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Free Software And Its Revolutionary Social Implications
Jizzbug writes: "OpenFlows has an interesting interview with Stefan Merten (of Oekonux in Germany) on the implications of Free Software in regards to social change (for the better). It'd be interesting to see what kind of famous Slashdot flamewar will erupt in response to the ideas set forth in this interview. Those in the audience that are freethinking and not jingoistic should find this a very enlightening and entertaining read."
my 2 cents: ...
a dispassionate explanation for those seeking to understand the rifts between OSI and FSF.
and
i like his very scientific sounding approach to the whole question.
"I think there is a world market for, maybe, five computers." __ IBM Chairman, 1943 __
Contrast this interview with For The Love Of Open Source, which says that Open Source is perfectly rational in a capitalistic society. I think that is more convincing.
hmm, in Internet Explorer they don't show up.. btw, currently my post got a +1, hehe.
When he speeks of the age of Free Software and Open Source he fails to mention the fact that open source (note no capital letters) is actually much older than Free Software, and thus Free Software is not in any way revolutionary; unless one considers restrictions on source code a freedom, which I don't.
Which brings us to the fact that I hate the fact that the Fascist Software Foundation and Richard M. Stalin have the guts to call it Free software.
ahh, back down to -1, Offtopic.
I'm waiting for the day when we start to have tools that allow UI interfaces to be designed on the fly, kind of like a TeX for the UI.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Theorize away! Academics will build their arguments and even create detailed demographies, without a demonstrable conclusion. And still, the development will continue, undisturbed.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
...the Free Car Movement (FCM). My car sucks :/
On the other hand producing physical goods require physical resources. A physical good is not instantly transportable, infinitely reproduceable and generally doesn't stay the way it was during usage. The tools for producing them are specialized and one can do very little to change them without those tools. People do and will need physical goods.
Therefore drawing conclusions about general econmic trends by observing trends in open source/free software concepts/community is fundementally wrong. There are just too many differences. Unless/until somebody invents a general purpose things builder (like you give it blueprints and the machine creates whatever it is out of dirt) a true information society is not be possible, and open source ideas ar not applicable to general economy.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Open Source is perfectly rational in a capitalistic society.
Most things are, as long as you are on the right side of the "fence".
Maybe it is time we get to moderate the editors as well. This article is nothing but a meta story about a list.
This is not about discussion but about cold ware politics. It is very close to calling linux a communist OS. (Hmm, it is used in china?) the word "marx" and capitalism are used so much, but only to trigger response.
i.e.
Another important factor is that capitalism is in deep crisis.
how does that relate to free or open software? NOT. Free or open software is about coding, not about freedom of speech, or software that cost nothing (if you do not value your time).
the only useful thing in the whole artilce is the fabber link. Now that was stuff i did not hear of.
--posted as ac because i am ashamed i reacted to the troll.
oss is geek software, ppl buy software cause it is quality and does not crash and is supported
You know, as soon as I see someone spell 'Microsoft' with a dollar sign (or any other allegedly humorous version) I tend to lose all interest in their views as I know they're biased.
But this was a good read. So funny! How someone can see to write with their head buried so far up their own arse I just don't know!
"Information wants to be paid"
I've read it before in lotss free software essays of varying quality, but there's still no explanation offered on how this is going to put food on my table (not in the way of making money, but in the way of literally producing the stuff and shipping it to the store around the corner), or build a computer, for that matter. I agree that the community can whip up a microprocessor design, but I'm not sure about the billion-dollar semiconductor plant to produce it...
How would that be handled, by waiting for people who think it's a cool idea? They'd have to wait for people who think it's a cool idea to build all those manufacturing tools and so on... In short, I don't think this can work.
Because the link is in the sig. I just wondered how long it will take the trolls to find this out...
What a terribly boring article. People need to learn that when you write for the web, longer is not better. That could have used some serious editing.
I think people need to seperate the two halves of this article into "Free vs Open Source" and "Free Software and capitalism".
/. of late where columnists laud StarOffice and Macromedia Flash because they're "flashy and cool", and who suggest that the open source and free software communities should embrace proprietary software, miss the point entirely. GNU/Linux only developed so quickly because of it's open source development, and we can only use it in the ways we love because so much of it is released under the GPL. It's an important point to keep in mind.
The first half gives a very informative account of the rift between Free Software and Open Source which is often overlooked, despite its being repeatedly stated by the Free Software Foundation. "Open Source" is about releasing source code for programs to increasive the quality of the product, and the productivity of the project. "Free Software" is about releasing the source code under a binding lisence to ensure all end users have the freedom to use the program as they wish. People love to scoff at "GNU/Linux" enthusiasts, but they forget that the Linux kernel is under the GNU GPL, and that without The GNU PRoject it's unlikely the Linux project would ever have grown so large.
There's also a tendency to talk of more links with proprietary software. There have been so many articles on
As for the discussion of Marxism in relation to Free Software, I'm sure plenty of ignoramuses will be posting saying how the author of the article must be a communist pig, and that he obviously wants to hijack Linux to take down President Bush. Hmm. Righto. It's an interesting discussion, though I get this sinking feeling whenever I hear the words "Marxism" and "contemporary" in the same sentence, given that so many of his ideas are completely outdated (like his idea of shareholders, being the workers in the companies, as opposed to the opportunist investors of today).
In todays world the driving force of the global economy is the human brain. Thoughts occur, and are solidified into products.
;-)
The quicker you solidify your thoughts into products the more likely you are to achieve a state of temporary monopoly.
The more novel your thought, the more likely you are to achieve a state of temporary monopoly.
Free Software is simply a collection of solidified thoughts which the originating individuals decided not to sell, but to give.
This will never change the fundamentals of a temporary monopoly driven economy. It may take the cost away from certain areas. Communication gets cheaper every day - travel was expensive, then telegrams were cheaper, then telephone calls were cheaper, now email is cheaper, in most cases its free. This in no way changed the capitalist nature of society - it simply oiled the wheels.
Linux does the same thing. I can start up a small software company with a PC and Free Software, or with a PC and MS software. The first way is cheaper, therefore more likely to happen - if the Free Software is as good, or better, than the MS I am also more likely to succeed.
If Dell could start with $1000 (which he did) back in the day the next 'big thing' could be starting today with a second hand PC and Linux - total cost $500. Capitalism rocks.
Sorry if this is off topic - but I've got WAAAYY too much Karma - its no fun anymore
No matter how important the 'information industry' becomes, we will never be able to replace our basic needs such as food, warmth, clothing and water.
What these leftist and marxist supporters like to believe is that given a nice society everyone will contribute like a good little puppy, what they neglect to face up to is reality : there are bottom feeders everywhere, and there always will be. People leech and feed from the profit of others when they can, and the only way other than (financial/material) incentives to make a population work is at the wrong end of a gun.
As countless visionary rulers have discovered over time, this approach works well for a short period of time, but the population is unhappy, the system suddenly no longer works, violent overthrow occurs, and we start a new system.
As disgusted as I am by some of the facets of capitalism as it is implemented in our current USA/Western Europe + others way, it appears to be working well, because the only people within the system sufficiently angered and upset to bring violence to bear are the groups like those who attacked the world trade summit. Many of these people have been observed to turn up to various rallies and demonstrations and initiate violence, which leads me to believe they attend for the violence, not for the ideals.
Capitalism sucks, nearly as bad as every other system of economy.
Free or open software is about coding, not about freedom of speech, or software that cost nothing (if you do not value your time).
That is your oppinion, not a blatent fact. To me, free and/or open software is about freedom of speech, just as it to some extent is also about gratis software.
As a programmer I value free and/or open software, because I can learn from them, and because it is a way for me to express myself, just like artists express themselves through their art.
As a software user, I value free and/or open software, because it is often gratis, and because I "know", that even if the author of the program decides to discontinue support of it, it will probably still be able to get support for it, as there are probably some knowledgable people using it, who knows just how to fix a problem, be it a work-around or a patch for the program. I am yet to see a user-created patch for Windows 3.1...
Linux being a communist OS? Nope, hardly. Is it a marxistic OS? To some extent - maybe you should read up on marxism and not just go with the McCarthyism definition of everything socialistic being evil.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Most socialistic countries in late 60. Europe tried to transform their model to a Socialism with a human face or something like that. The russian Big Brother smashed this but anyway this lead to nowhere. This model talked about economics, freedom etc. It forgot to talk about people. Most people were not motivated to do anything so they didn't.
If Free Software does want to be the primary bussiness model it has to to find a motivation for most developers at first.
Yes, some BSD seem to have less, but i think most bugs in linux(the kernel) are found cause people look for them in the source, instead of looking on the outside and finding something, cause thats far more difficult todo i guess...
And i wonder if MS who sure also looks for bugs in NT and creates patches for them, tells you what they found, i think they just instead make a global patch and maybe they corrected over a 100 bugs in that ? do you know, does anyone know except MS ? maybe they dont solve bugs cause noone wrote a exploit for it and its a hard piece to rewrite cause it would take a lot of time, and they really want to use that time elsewehere, do you know ? no only MS knows...
So i guess you just cant compare linux and NT in that way, sorry to say but true...
Quazion...
My seconds of trolling and flameing..
The current resurgence of left-of-centre governments in Europe could be seen as backing the argument of the emergence of a new type of society up. While these governments lean to the left, they are still much closer to the centre than the left.
A bloody good idea, if you ask me.
I'm fed up with every fucking teenager, mom and pop having to drive alone in their own car, blocking up the streets and gassing the hell out of us pedestrians and bicyclists.
Private car use should be forbidden by law wherever the public transportation or travelling by foot or by bike is feasible. That should take care of the most population centers. Intercity- and interstate travel by car is OK.
At least set a minimum number for passangers, for christssake.
This is not about discussion but about cold ware politics. It is very close to calling linux a communist OS. (Hmm, it is used in china?) the word "marx" and capitalism are used so much, but only to trigger response.
It is sad that many people like you due to Cold War propaganda and misinformation somehow equate Marxism and Communism with evil. The fact of the matter is that the basis behind Marxism is how to benefit society as a whole while not exploiting the workers in the community and creating classes of haves and have-nots. Unfortunately Marxism, like democracy and capitalism, is an ideal that has yet to be properly implemented in reality on a large scale, although some would say that there are communes in various parts of the world that are Marxist.
The problem with communism in the real world is that it came up against a number of harsh realities such as the fact that goods and services are not infinite, and cannot be distributed to the populace as if they were. This is not the case with software or any other sort of intellectual property.
With Free Software, the most able developers can distribute the fruit of their efforts to multitudes of users with little, if any expectation of reward. To each according to his ability (i.e. contribute what you can be it code, documentation or testing) and to each according to his wants (everybody gets the software they desire) is close to becoming a reality in the microcosm that is the Free Software world and this was exactly one of the guiding principles of Marxism.
However, I don't believe this means that Marxism/Communism is about to make a comeback in the political/economic arena any time soon. Instead I take it to be an indication that if technology advances to the degree that devices like Star Trek replicators are possible, then maybe we'll see a resurgence of communism/Marxism as a major political/economic movement.
* M$, Micro$oft and other varieties. ... a beowulf cluster of these (before trolls took this over (me included))
;-)...
* Spelling Porn as Pr0n (I was around in the cool old days, oh yes)
* www.goatse.cx
*
* Can you install Linux on it? (before trolls took this over (me included))
Any more anyone - perhaps we can get the definitive list and get it added into the Lameness filter
Gimme a break.
Sure, he started from his dorm, kept parts in his car.
What made him different from every other startup tech with a hole in the wall office was his parent's money.
A cool $1million, doled out in three different occasions.
Sure, he didn't screwup that loan - but please don't talk about Dell being a self-made man.
Anyone having worked mandatory overtime, at $7.50 per hour without health insurance is going to puke all over you for your Dellish sentiments.
Sure, Austin, Texas has a few 'dellionaires' (I dated one) but none of them would be anyone without the folks slaving away in Austin, Nashville, Ireland and (I think still) Brazil.
. This sig unintentionally left blank. I meant to put something here, but I'm busy.
As far as I can tell, it's not in the sig (there is no sig, it's an AC!) but it's just appended to the link with a bunch of spaces (%20) in between the goatse and the site redirect that goes before it.
If you enter this in to your navbar:
http://srd.yahoo.com/* http://www.linux.com"
You can guess where you'll end up. Clever trick, but then taco said they'd have to be clever.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Don't forget, you can get Trollmaster 2001 @ http://www.geocities.com/frostpist
The article makes so many interesting statements. I was intrigued. Here are my opinions on it:
:-)
(1) Western culture = capitalism
I disagree. One of the things we're supposed to be free enough to do is live as we like, and that may mean discarding the trade-for-self-beneficial-profit system we're in, but...
we can't escape: Mankind will always have physical stuff you need to swap for other physical stuff someone else needs. The need brings value, the value brings barter and trade. And we're back in business.
(2) Information Society removes us from production
I think that someone else has said this, but we still need to produce stuff to wear, food to eat, houses to live in cars to drive and computers to code on. Admittedly much of the production of this stuff occurs outside Europe and the US, but...
we can't escape the fact that, for the claims of liberating people from production into an information society, the producers of our goods (in overseas nations) are vastly underpaid for what we pay the TransNational Corporations who make them and their countries don't benefit for that work.
The fact that more than half the world doesn't have a phone makes me suspect that we're living like Marx did, comfortably in bourgeoise London while the people who might benefit most from our thoughts are not even equipped to join the discussion, yet looking up to the Western/Capitalist way to answer their problems.
(3) GPL society will do away with man's selfishness
I *really* don't believe that. The whole capitalist system, even at its roots is bounded in benefitting self in trade of anything you can sell. So what's going to remove this from people to happily share their ideas. I think that if people have the security to spend their days as they please, without worrying about tomorrow and the troubles it might bring, then they can begin to stop meeting their own needs...
we can't escape this selfishness. Or can we? There's nothing I've heard anyone in this discussion say that provides that. I'll get flamed for stating this outright, but I believe there is an answer. E-mail me.
take care.
Ken.Lewis
It's interesting for me to finally read about the definitions of these areas. For me, when you say "Free software", I immediately think of "Free as in RealPlayer" (i.e. closed source, utterly commercial, probably spyware, but it costs nothing to download)
And yet when you say "Open source", it means to me, "Open as in Apache" (i.e. something with which you can tinker, something you're free to distribute, something you can give to friends)
I realise you'll all slate me as being completely wrong, but if the distinction between Free Software and Freeware is too blurred even for me to see at a glance, what hope stand business users of understanding the philosophy?
I think this is shallow thinking, an illusion in progress, because "production process" is more interconnected and harder to contain in one bucket of isolated money/goods/value added than the interviewee lets on.
Human labor is always increasing because there are more humans laboring with more opportunity to labor at something, and therefore is always more needed; ie., there is a yawning and only getting wider permanent shortage of it because more things go undone, and the undonness of things in the world is only increasing -- thanks to production and creation of resources, as well as waste, want and web, and also, the loss of ecosystem and resources.
It is the displacement and barriers which come about from various turmoil, ranging from eco-calamities and wars to local economical or production hiccups that derail the effectiveness of any one human's labor, to the point of belittling or endangering the human.
The true invariant is having a unit of actual time to fill per human. What goes into it, by definition, is the human's labor and the complement of it, everything else. But even in such a binary division, the conception of free time does not respect this division: One's free time may well contribute to one's human labor.
I'm hopeful about free software, as adding flow capacity to the human exchange manifold, but I don't buy the obsolescence of human labor.
Ooh!!! Ooh!!! Gimme some!!! Gimme some!!!
without IT being generated buy some phony pr talknicians.
on to the desktop.
Here's the thing I don't get: (and since I don't get it, I must be a closed-minded jingoist...sheesh)
This vision, this 'rethought Marxism', doesn't have any real meat to it. Now, I'd love to join the mailing list and see if anyone has come up with any substance to back these ideas. The thing is, I don't believe there can be any substance to them.
The idea of a "GPL Society", where everyone takes what they need and contributes what they want, is fundamentally flawed. It's possible, perhaps, to get some distance towards this within a capitalist system because of the ability to convert quite a lot of labor into information transfer while also adding value. The thing is, Free software is a poor example... it exists because those people who are contributing to it do not rely on their creation for survival. Modelling an overall social system, where objects and services often cannot be translated into a digital form, on a system which ONLY exists as perfectly reproducible digital information, is a mistake of the highest order; this is where the "GPL Society" falls over. There are three big reasons why...
First, you cannot expect a 'self-unfolding' project to provide food for you, or heat for your house, or schooling for your kids. You can only dedicate time to these projects when your basic needs have been met... not only has Free Software grown up inside a capitalist system, it is completely dependant on that system to sustain the creators of Free Software. Only succesful capitalists have time to create things which do not contribute to their survival. The only way for the GPL society to work is to ensure that every person has, for free, everything they could need, in a manner that doesn't involve labor on the part of some other individual.
Second, even if we could completely automate every layer of food production (and every other industry and commodity) it still wouldn't work because of this sort of scenario: I want my kids to go to a good school, so I check out all the local freely offered schooling (because I live in the GPL Society, all the schooling is provided by people who want to do that sort of thing as a self-unfolding project that makes them feel good, and they get to do this because they don't need anything at all) and I decide that nobody around me can provide what I think is a brilliant education. So, I go out and find a teacher who's REALLY REALLY good... the thing is, this teacher also has 6000 other parents clamoring for her time, so she gets to choose who she picks. The only way I can have a better chance is if I can offer some incentive to the teacher; I have to figure out how I can give her something she WANTS (she's already got everything she needs). Guess what... we're right back to capitalism. Maybe she wants a bigger house and a bunch of handcarved art-nuveau accent work, and the only way I can give it to her is to get a bunch of house-building hand-carving type guys together to build it for her... but some of those guys want some incentive to drop their own architectural self-unfolding projects and come help me instead... how can I compensate these guys for their time? What if I don't have anything they want? Well, I guess I need to give them something they can use to trade for things they want... like money. Until we invent replicators, it's impossible to give everyone all the things they WANT; capitalism, and the market economy, is the only way to deal with this VERY common scenario. It's so common, most people don't even think about it anymore. It's second nature for a reason, folks, and not because you've been trained by capitalist bugaboos to think like that.
Third, there will always bee a huge horde of people who ONLY take, or who exploit the desires of others for their own gain. When exclusively taking becomes not just possible, but easy and socially acceptable, then even more people won't contribute anything back. If all needs are provided for, luxuries become paramount and exploitation is EASIER, not harder. Greed automatically breaks the "GPL Society" and any other idea that follows the same path.
Like Marx, this is a nice idea when it's kicked around by a bunch of homogenous thinkers on a mailing list, but when you try to apply it to the rest of the non-intelligencia it abruptly falls to bits.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
Damn right my man (+5 He's not wrong ;-) It's quite obvious to those of us who were brought up in parts of the world where socialism isn't a dirty word that Linux, and Open Source/Free Software is a socialist idea.
;-) please respond and debate rather than denting my karma further...
I also can't see Communism making a political return, until a time when we have the communication infrastructure to catch and eliminate all corruption and wastage. IIRC Peter F. Hamilton had a similar idea for the 'Martians' in the Night's Dawn trilogy. To be honest I think this would be a good thing- It's quite obvious that capitalism cannot see past the near term and this had lead to the way we are shafting the environment. I can only see the Chinese (with their AWFUL implementation of communism) actually making enough of a go of a space program to get off of this rock and I'm damn glad their getting involved as hopefully pride if not profit shall make the US really go for it again.
None of this is trolling, flamebait or any other negative thang. If you disagree with me (and I'm sure plenty of you do
J-aims
--
Yo, whatever happened to peas? Join T( H)GS
"Come, come into my coven
and become Lucifer's child!"
-Richard M. Stallman, 1989 (Google Usenet archives)
The article did have a great deal of political commentary in it. Blah blah, capitalism,blah, blah Marxism---BORING. That article was way too long. Honestly, that whole information wants to be free argument is crap. Information has and never will be free. It always has a cost. Food, energy, competition, whatever. It will always cost something to aquire a resource of any kind, and always at a loss (entropy).
Second, the reason capitalism as an applied practice works ( for the most part) is because it's mechanisms are closest to those of nature and evolution. Eat or be eaten. Socialism and Marxism are in stark contrast to natural history. Especially in terms of human society and civilisation. There will always be a gap between the haves and have-nots, and no half-baked theory is going to prevent that.
Software may be free-speech, or gratis, but it will always cost something, at the very least it will cost time. And time is one of the most valuable things we have. Time is brushing your teeth and taking a crap and feeding yourself so you can code for free. Time has a cost, because it is a fixed resource. So, information may want to be free, but so does that nice new car I want.
Too bad the time it took create/grow those goods you need to continue your time here cost someone else theirs and they want compensation.
Even star trek replicators have an associated cost, in terms of how may atoms of whatever raw resource is utilised, in terms of the limited energy resource used to power the generators to run the ship.
Everything can be reduced to data, (on/off, existant/non-existent, here/there), and the data available is finite. Add to that the fact that the data is corrupting constantly and is lost (no permanent storage). Therefore everything has a value (relative to all else) and a price tag for it's use.
Don't expect software to deliver us to utopia until we discover a nutritional value to bytes.
You may have value as a coder because your obtuse language is difficult for the masses to grasp, and because you are few. So were priests back in the Dark Ages. But to think that an information society solves the fundamental problems of humanity and that OSS or FS can deliver us from the dank fossil fuel cave of the post-industrial era is being naive. Software is a limited technology. Sooner or later, DNA and amino acids will be the language du jour, and you will all be out of work. We need to get out of this consumerism-based culture because it is not sustainable, and its not capitalism that is the problem, but the fact that our economies are based on fossil fuel. We need to begin producing replicable bio-products, not another window manager.
Software is never free, and software's time in the sun is coming to a close. Bioware is on it's way.
I will debate any day of the week how there are no true socially interactive qualities to OSS. Hogwash!
Aye aye aye aye, I am the Frito bandito.
capitalism is in deep crisis.
Well if this isn't a troll i don't know.
-It is saying nothing.
-and then other points are told back to free and open software.
I do not say open software is good or bad, I mean that saying open software is socialist software is a troll. I did use the word communistic as the opposite of capitalistic.
I know the sovjet communistic system is not what marx had in mind when he wrote das kapital, but with communistic is defined first by the people in his time. If i say communistic = soicialistic i do not mean sovjet (or china) communistic= soicialistic. So you could call linux an communistic OS by this definition.
Ok, I did not read DAS KAPITAL.
All i meant to say that this article has included a lot of troll stuff by dragging in a lot of " capatalism is..."
I am yet to see a user-created patch for Windows 3.1...
The shareware (ok not free) trumpet winsock comes quite close. But try to find reasonable support for linux 1.0.... (yes it is there, but not better than support for windows 31.)
-- this i going to dent my karma....but no ac this time, and it is my opinion
Why contrast? The interview first goes into depts to explain the differences between Open and Free. Then it continues to debate the benefits and revolutionary properties (?) of Free Software. The article you mention is explicitly about Open Source Software.
Since both articles are about different issues I find contrasting them a little bit difficult at best, and pointless at worst.
Although the article has some strong points, especially the artificially created shortage of goods by protecting them with IP laws, a comparison of Free Software with Marxism is quite far stretched IMHO.
But it is still a very appealing model for me.
Pardon me for pissing in the punch here, but...
Free software won't change the world.
Free bread and vegetables would change the world. Free steel would change the world. Free software? It's an interesting concept for a particular industry. However, I would say 80-90% of the world doesn't give a damn about free software.
First of all, there are more important things to work for than for free software... which is why music, film, art, and literature are all not free either, and those have been important to culture far longer than software has been (collectively). Second, there are a lot of people who are not directly affected by software, how it was obtained, and who worked on it. Third, most people who use any kind of software in their day to day lives are concerned neither with the quality or the price of the software that they use... far too often the quality and price of computer hardware greatly offsets that concern, and no one cares about software unless it starts to break... and then even at that point, most people live with it and are not inclined to complain too loudly, given the overall convenience that modern computer systems provide.
Free software changing the world? Free software having revolutionary social implications? That's a tough sell. Segway has a better shot at changing the world, and I don't even know if they'll last 3 years. Please don't spout off comments like this without direct, convincing evidence to state these claims, otherwise Slashdot is nothing more than the online version of the Weekly World News, Linux edition. You might have far better, convincing arguments if you simply take a more rational view of what free software can affect.
(I'm all for free software, by the way)
>>capitalism is in deep crisis.
>Well if this isn't a troll i don't know.
I call a global recession just a bit of crisis...
Sure there are a lot of trolling idiots out there saying oss/fs is socialist, but there's an equal amount a meta-trolls saying that calling someone calling oss/fs socialist.
It's quite possible to hold the belief that oss/fs is socialist, indeed if you didn't live in a country where McCarthy beat socialism out of and turned it into an 'evil' you might come to the logical conclusion that it is...
And no, I'm not meta-meta-trolling
J-aims
--
Yo, whatever happened to peas? Join T( H)GS
I'm waiting for the day when we start to have tools that allow UI interfaces to be designed on the fly, kind of like a TeX for the UI.
FLTK gets close to the mark. It's the easiest cross-platform opensource gui generator I've seen. http://fltk.sf.net
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Of course, you apologize in advance, saying Marxism "has yet to be properly implemented" and that its basis is to benefit society as a whole. Well, the basis behind driving drunk may be to get home safely, but the evidence suggests it's a goddamn stupid idea. Of course, maybe it just isn't always properly implemented.
You seem to agree that Free Software is Marxist. Do you think it will succeed then? You and the other both cite the ability of anyone to take whatever they want without giving back to the community. The author even boasts about how he's never contributed anything!
I guess I'm the technological equivalent of a kulak, since while I'm willing to contribute (as I have) to the body of free software, and not willing to give up my livelyhood for others. Luckily, I agree with you that "Marxism/Communism is about to make a comeback in the political/economic arena any time soon" so I don't worry about being rounded up and shot.
So contrary to capitalism, in which increasing automation always destroys the work places for people and thus their means to live, in a GPL Society maximum automation would be an important aim of the whole society.
Once things are wonderfully automated, what do the people that used their braun instead of their brains for a living do then? I think maybe smart people forget that not everyone can support themselves by sitting in some office micromanaging or writing code for the greater good of the new economy.
There always has to be jobs for the bottom half. This is just a reality of society.
... or are we assuming their usefulness will be just as passé as capitalism when that time comes?
----- rL
You got to be on the right winger to gain general support on this site. You can not be some leftist anarchist and hope to entreaty people with your ideas even if they make sense, over here.
marx" and capitalism are used so much, but only to trigger response.
It is sad that many people like you due to Cold War propaganda and misinformation somehow equate Marxism and Communism with evil.
I never said communism is evil.
But by quoting " linux is communism" you seem to think i say "linux is the evil". I never said that! you are so precondiotion that people say "communism = evil" you did read my "communist linux" as a cold war statement.
I can tell you:
-I am not a american.
-I was born after people stepped on the moon. i never heard about this mcartynism.
goods and services are not infinite....... This is not the case with software or any other sort of intellectual property
If software does not fall within this economic base principle,why use economic theories for this?
By the way, gratis software is only gratis if you do not value your time.
-- bye bye karma(opinions are not liked by moderators)
There is nothing wrong with meta-meta trolling, as long you are aware of this. (And you do not value your karma).
and.... I never said (marxism=)communism is evil in my ac start of this threat. I just said the article was there to get responses... and damn i did.
No matter how important the 'information industry' becomes, we will never be able to replace our basic needs such as food, warmth, clothing and water.
What these rightist and capitalist supporters like to believe is that given a nice society everyone will contribute like a good little puppy, what they neglect to face up to is reality : there are bottom feeders everywhere, and there always will be. People leech and feed from the profit of others when they can, and the only way other than (financial/material), which is why we allow people thousands of people at a company to work and a man with lots of capital called a President or CEO to profit off all his thousands of workers.
That is the beauty of capitalism; you get to work for the profit or a rich man! So the rich can become richer. We are all unworthy of keeping the fruits of our labour and should sweat and allow a few leeches to profit off thousands of us.
In Capitalism there are bottom feeders; and they are allowed to become the top of the food chain. Tell me does Ted Turner really deserve to take in such a large share of the profit of a company where thousands of others do most of the work, for him? Just because he has massive amounts of capital should he be allowed to do this kind of shit? No, he is a leech, a parasite on all his workers, but he is allowed under our system to be at the top, only because he has enough money to be at the head of a company. In socialism he would be at the bottom like all the other blood suckers, at the bottom where he belongs.
I think it's rather presumptuous of you to assume that "people [who use] their braun instead of their brains," in the present social order, are incapable of creative activity on their own terms.
It's that old truism: "You are what you do." If you do stupid, boring, and monotonous work, chances are pretty good that you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous.
A postcapitalist society has the potential to really permit people to live again -- to work because they love to work and love what they do -- not out of some fallacious and wrongheaded "work ethic."
Insomuch as the Slashdot crowd is concerned, consider the early hackers.... why did they get into this in the first place? I doubt greatly that "making myself and a bunch of heartless VCs richer than snot" was high on the agenda. No, rather, it was about the love of learning, creating, tinkering... hacking.
It's the same thing that drove Beethoven. And Shakespeare. And Picaso and van Gogh. The work itself was a labour of love, not some toiling monotony. Just because the hacker's passion is technology doesn't mean this "toiling underclass" you describe don't have -- or couldn't have -- passions that are equally voracious.
I'm not so presumptuous to think that ethic -- that work should be play -- can't enrapture people who don't fit into some elite model of the "intellectual."
There don't have to be jobs for the "bottom half," because the idea of the "bottom half" is absurd.
Automation, cybernation and liberatory technologies have the potential to make work itself -- in a capitalistic sense, in any case -- obsolete.
Maybe, then, we can get back to our humanity for a change.
bacchusrx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
Where does all the money to feed FSF people come from? The FSF seems to get most of its money from donations, or from the programmers' other jobs.
But presumably most of this money comes from people working in proprietary software who also use GNU tools or whatever.
So if all software was free (which is what Stallman et al. want, isn't it?) where would the FSF get money to feed itself?
Or am I missing something? Somebody please explain how the system works.
I agree completely. It's hard to imagine the huge parts of the world that don't have access to computer [gasp!], telephones, running water, etc... We're lucky to have these (and many other) things in a world where may others are no so lucky.
"[...] gratis software is only gratis if you do not value your time."
So, if I offer you 100 dollars gratis, it's not gratis, because it takes time for you to take the money?
Applying basic reasoning (which is of course time consuming, and therefore not gratis) I come to the conclusion that if someone offers me gratis software, it's gratis for me, beause I don't have to give him anything in return. No - I can't give him 5 minutes, because it's not something I have to give or spend.
"Time is an illusion, lunch time doubly so."
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
What does patriotism have to do with this?
Jingoistic: Extreme nationalism characterized especially by a belligerent foreign policy; chauvinistic patriotism.
Oliver's army is here to stay Oliver's army are on their way And I would rather be anywhere else But here today
Until the 1970s capitalism promised a better world to people in the Western countries, to people in the former Soviet bloc and to the Third World. It stopped doing it starting in the 1980s and dismissed it completely in the 1990s. Today the capitalist leaders are glad if they are able to fix the biggest leaks in the sinking ship.
This guy has obviously never heard of the business cycle and transformational technologies. We happen to be at a nexus where the business cycle is bottoming exactly at the time when we have so many promising technologies that will transform society (biotech, nanotech, etc.)
Capitalism works. It's just cyclical. The Marxist utopians always wait until the bottoming of an economic cycle (hence his "sinking ship" metaphor") to wave their red flags and proclaim capitalism dead. And yet, the cycle continues and we'll be on our way up again soon.
As for the capitalism's promise to better the Third World, no such promise existed. Capitalism promises that if you create a fair market, lower barriers to entry, and allow people to innovate and work hard, you'll prosper. The Third World's poverty is not because of capitalism but despite it. If the Third World would get on board, clean up their corrupt governments and change the culture of always wanting a handout, maybe capitalism would work for them.
Ask post-war Korea and Japan about how fast an economy can be rebuilt (within a generation!). You just have to have the culture to do it.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Pretty much every answer that has criticised the article seems to hold the view that we are now at the pinnacle of development, at least economically. While change just for the sake of change might not alway be a good thing, nobody can argue that we don't live in a society full of change. Some of our "fundamentals truths" about human nature, for instance, may be rocked. Just be carefull about the words "never" and "always".
Also, please don't make the error of confusing "socialists" simply as believers of marx. Socialism existed before marx and has developed long after marx. The only thing that "socialism" basically implies is that the ownership of the means of production are not private. Everything else can be negotiated, some branches even think a money-based economy is a good thing.
The views in the article are old fashioned to me. They take for granted that there has to be division. I for one, refer to the 2 movements as one: Open Source/Free Software - I don't want to divide them, specifically, because they are 2 movements with similar goals, OS for the commercial/popular side, and FS for the philosophy. I believe they only have a chance of long term existence if we treasure both as separate but meaningful means to change the way we think about software.
We need unity, and if you can stretch your hearts, not only between these 2 factions, also with the much hated microsoft, even though I myself find it hard to think and write such a thing.
If you ask bill gates ( for example, in this recent interview) what motivates him, he says it's because he wants a computer in every home, because he wants things to be simple to use, he wants to be involved. It's a good vision, even though he's distorted in the way he carries it out.
That's why we need unity. How memorable would it be if a person like Gates turned around and said he was wrong, and he was sorry for his limited vision on the impact of his efforts on society, that now he saw how important the method was as well as the aim.
And same for this guy in this article: Seems to me he also is attached too much to the end product than the process. The process is what we will be living through for the rest of our lives. The end product is just a party one evening. Why don't we concentrate on improving the process of getting to our different software utopias? Utopia will always be 5 steps away, that's what utopia is there for in the first place - to move you forward.
For example, computers may well be doing the kind of hard labour that clerks and secretaries used to do, but you can't predict the entire universe: that's rationalism, and that's what the great belivers in Taylor and Ford used to believe in. Better to believe that in a social environment, the best solution comes from your interaction with that environment: Social constructionism puts for the point of view that reality is constructed through our interactions, not through planning it out beforehand. Look at the work of agile methodologists for example: make small changes in increments and you have a chance to see if that's really the best way forward. Utopian visions of societies are flawed already: it might be perfect is everyone was a communist, or if everyone was a capitalist, but the reality is most people are somewhere in between(or nowhere near either), and so is reality!
But we all want to do good and change the way things are, why can't we work together and use dialogue to build our future instead of wasting time fighting between each other?
Oh, dear, I'm going to have to explain this again, while I should be sipping my coffee.
Ideas (software, music, movies, etc) are not property.
Look through the Ten Commandments, and you'll see that it's wrong to covet your neighbor's wife, his goat, his house. But nothing about his ideas. Indeed, I suspect that if you study any religion, you'll find no reference to copyright or patents.
Copyright and patents emerged late in the last milennium... basically, intellectuals and scientists managed to convince governments to pass these laws... for their own benefit, of course.
But think about it... and go back to my proposition that ideas are not property. Like many have observed, "stealing" an idea (or copying software) does not deny its orginator of the "property". In fact, intellectual property laws serve to enforce scarcity. The theory is that more ideas will be generated by rewarding those who create them. But consider the number of people who are denied the use of the idea... is it a fair trade-off?
In fact, intellectual property laws themselves are a socialist construction (though they came into existence somewhat before socialism itself). They protect special interests (in this case, the interests of smart people) at the expense of the general public. That may not be socialism in the way the term is commonly used, but it's socialism in the sense that it's the opposite of a free market.
So Free Software is a true free-market phenomenon. Though it might go against the grain of what you think of as capitalism (i.e. big companies making money), think about it for a second. Intellectual property laws do nothing but grant monoplies on certain things. For example, Windows. Whatever the merits of the MS antitrust case, the real monopoly behind it all is the one that the government granted Microsoft for the use of the term "Windows" and for the code that makes it up. If Microsoft makes more money because of that, it's not because of free markets but because of artificial government protections. The fact that the government is now prosecuting MS for making the most of those laws is indeed sweet irony.
Socialist countries (or countries that lean toward it) will eventually find that they don't especially like Free software, because their impulse is to control. It might go against the grain in a fairly capitalist country like the US, but to the extent that it does, it's because of non-capitalist (more accurately, non-free-market) laws.
So, the terms "capitalist" and "socialist" are really not especially useful... think more in terms of free markets and controlled markets. In those terms, Free Software is the ultimate free market creation. That little or no money changes hands is irrelevant... the freedom of the software provides the public with software at a good price. THAT is the purpose of a free market economy, after all. It's not about making it easy for people to profit, but about providing consumers with goods and services at the lowest possible price.
Oh, and just so we're clear... I think that in an ideal world, there never would have been any IP laws. But I also feel that repealing them would be disastrous. Free Software serves to slowly undermine the IP laws in a non-destructive way, and that's why it's catching on.
Did we not leave that kind drivel in the last century? I actually read the words "freed from the chains of capitalism".
This guy is actually talking about how everything could be GPL'd. This is Marxism with a new name, nothing more. It's fashionable to say "GPL" in a an article, and IIRC it was the same in the 1890's.
The most valuable resource we have is people, and we don't need them creating art and coding another damn window manager. Get over there and answer that phone, sweep that floor, and shovel that turd. Our most valuable resource is the expenditure of energy by the masses. BATTERIES.
If there really was a need for sysadmins, I would see ads for them, and have a better job. If there really was a need for basket weavers and crappy golf players, we would see a demand for it. Face it people, no one cares about your self-unfolding hobby or "talent", we need someone to haul this sack of coffee beans down the mountain for delivery to Seattle.
If this type of system he describes (again, the only reason this got ANY attention at all was because of the OSS software spin) was the optimal system, we would be living it right now.
To think that software will save the day, or that a licensing model will free us from our "chains" is BULLSHIT. Get real. Read the end of the article where this Utter Idiot spouts his simplistic "GPL Society" vision. Same damn flawed arguments put forth by the Marxists. GPL Society??? What, are you going to tell me that my mind/body and any derivatives (does that include my poop?) are open to the public and must be released after any modification? Cool, cuz I'd really like to get busy with Shannon Elizabeth.
Open Source Shannon Elizabeth!
What a crackpot. Some things are more valuable than others. I have something you want/need, but it is in short supply. If you want it, you will have to trade/barter with me for something of equal value. How hard is this to grasp? I can't believe that this issue is still being questioned. The only thing he did get right was that free software is available because the basic needs of others were already met, allowing them to create Free software. I have stated the same before and been flamed for it. Fuck that. Nobody has time to code, and then give it away, all the while with an empty belly. Free Software is a luxury. Someone, somewhere had to get stepped on in order for you to sit in a comfy chair and write software for free. Now how utopian and altruistic is that?
gratis if you do not value your time.
So, if I offer you 100 dollars gratis
OK, give it to me....
oh wait.... I have to come to you(or do you want to get to this rainy place...) , since you are giving out dollars it takes a lot of time to get there. And then i still have to spend some time changing it in a currency i can use. (and the bank is taking a cut of it. )
So for the logic you might be right, but in practice there is more to it.
You forgot my favorites:
Naked petrified Natalie Portman with hot grits in her pants.
I love your drunk driving analogy.
I would say they also came up against the harsh reality of human nature. Like it or not. It is pretty well documented that the societies trying to organize this way also developed a stunningly huge "class divide" -- just along different vectors than capitalistic societies. Party leaders vs. non-members, insiders vs. outsiders, wrong-thinkers' etc. With the "upperclass" using/misusing their power and position in surprisingly similar ways (personal gain - luxury, power, sex).
The first article goes into why it seems that Open Source is incompatible with usual capitalism, but is not. People join Open Source projects not because they want to give something back or because they have a wealth surplus, but because they expect to economically gain from it.
The second article thinks that Open Source heralds the second coming of Socialism and will ultimately defeat Capitalism and the reason for production. (Each accordin to it's needs).
Sorry, but I don't agree with you. It is true that a couple of years ago there was a major shift to the left, with socialist parties winning in the U.K., France etc. But in the meanwhile, we see a new shift, this time to the right. The last two years, elections in Belgium, Austria and Italy were won by by right-of-centre parties resulting in right-of-centre governments, some further of the center than others. And I do expect this trend to continue in future European elections.
Naked petrified Natalie Portman with hot grits in her pants.
Pedants corner: Naked girls don't have pants. Although to be fair, you probably haven't seen the former. You'll probaby have a vast collection of the latter from the local playgroup's washing line though.
I didn't find the article "enlightening" or "entertaining." It was just warmed-over-Marxism. Marx and Engles did make some worthy points in their Communist Manifesto, and they are historically important for having inspired the Russian Revolution, etc., but I doubt that Marxists have anything interesting to say about the "revolutionary social implications" of free software or of anything else that's really happening today. In fact, I suspect that their ideological furvor and their proclivities for endless argument might actually impeed the progress of free and/or open software, though not fatally (I hope).
----------
Manifesto for the Peoples of the Third Millennium
The problem is the multiple uses of the word "free". RMS likes to say "free as in free speech, not as in free beer". Lessig has a better approach in his new book. Free translates into both "libre" and "gratis". Free software is as in libre, not necessarily as in gratis. The reason for the choice of the term "open source" was an attempt to work around the lack of respect in the business community for things that are gratis. The business community greatly respects things that are libre, as in free enterprise.
Ok, I have karma to burn so here's goes my best attempt to get a -5 troll.
Software, free software could change the world? Yes. Free as in beer and speech , yes.
The Soviet Unions space program would have far surpassed ours in the 60's and 70's if they had access to our scientific research and software. Hell, the entire planet is playing catch-up to the United states in regards to space research and everyone is paying catch up to the Japan technology machine. Why is there pockets of technology in the sea of technological backwardness? One could say that eastern europe doesnt have any computers. That is pure BS, the United states threw away more computers than there were people needing them in europe just last year. Hell, I threw away 5 computers last year and 30 computers from work. All of them are quite serviceable and useable with linux and other free software. and can help students, and scientists.
The hardware and software is out there. the hardware is destroyed by morons that run our countries corperations... ("someone might get ourt plans to the XYZ dis-comboobulator" off of that computer"... but that's the receptionists pc, and that info is on the hard drive... " I DONT CARE, destroy everything including the monitor! we cant let our competitiors get an edge!"
Tis the thinking of the morons we call our CEO's CTO's and CSO's... Now the task to the free software...
The software can change the world, A free GIS system, or even a free SQL database with OS can give technology to tiny and small governments that are trying to build any infrastructure to their community. and this infrastructure is what will change the lives of the people that live there. giving them sewers, drinkable water, roads, give the rest of the world the huge luxuries like these that every western european and United states citizen take for granted every day.
This is where that free software will change the planet....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The theory is that more ideas will be generated by rewarding those who create them. But consider the number of people who are denied the use of the idea... is it a fair trade-off?
No, really! I'm just trying to reward the guy who wrote this term paper the first time.
Oliver's army is here to stay Oliver's army are on their way And I would rather be anywhere else But here today
At least I can spell.
I do not expect to find many people here capable of discrete thought when it comes to Socialism
Ah, more of the Appeal to Ridicule fallacy.
Let me tell you something. I LIVE in a country governed by the Social Democrats and I have first hand experience in how the system hinders effective job creation. If I hire someone to work for me with a salary of $50000/year it costs me a total of $66500/year because of the ridiculously high social costs. If I hire them as "full time workers" I can't lay them off for half a year even if I run out of money! The law doesn't care how I am supposed to get the money, but if I don't pay them a half year's salary I break the law. Hence, I only hire people as "part time workers" (3 month contracts) and now the unions are breathing down my neck. It is as if I as the employer am somehow obliged to create jobs and make sure that no matter how the economy is those jobs will be secure. It's madness!
I don't have the fucking time to "oppress the working class" because the working class is already oppressing me. I guess that's the left-wing way of showing gratitude for the jobs I created.
Then there's the argument about workers and "the management" not being equal. That's damn right. Business cannot be run by a committee!
Alright ... you go do that ... because you and RMS are the only ones who care.
People love to scoff at "GNU/Linux" enthusiasts, but they forget that the Linux kernel is under the GNU GPL, and that without The GNU PRoject it's unlikely the Linux project would ever have grown so large.
*EEEEMMMPPP* wrong again *EEEEMMMPPP* Linux is so big because of peoples desire for options and a desire to create. Without the GNU project it would still be open source and would still thrive. It's because the GNU is a leech on the computer world and can't get their own OS working that GNU openly endorsed linux. GNU slaps its name on all kinds of things, but that's all it is ... a brand name.
There have been so many articles on /. of late where columnists laud StarOffice and Macromedia Flash because they're "flashy and cool", and who suggest that the open source and free software communities should embrace proprietary software, miss the point entirely.
You show me where I can eat, sleep, live, and be comfortable for free ... and I'll start liking the boring blinking console. Until that time ... I'll keep using the "flashy and cool stuff.
As for the discussion of Marxism in relation to Free Software, I'm sure plenty of ignoramuses will be posting saying how the author of the article must be a communist pig, and that he obviously wants to hijack Linux to take down President Bush.
Here ... from your beloved gnu.org
The $5000 Deluxe Distribution includes all GNU software compiled for your choice of computing platform (microchip and operating system). Please contact the FSF Office if you are interested.
Yup, righto that's $5K American dollars for FREE software ... which absolutely amazes me because you would think they would just charge for the cost of the production because they don't really like money. But companies like cheapbytes are bad because they're a capitalistic company trying to spread linux at an affordable cost ... right?
And in the light of capitalism I will quote cartman "AH! I think yer all a bunch of goddamme hippies"
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
You're right. Free is confusing and open seems quite clear. But even in languages that don't confuse 0% price with 100% liberty, free (in either sense of the word) still doesn't sound very serious.
I recently received a mail from FSF Europe (whose mailing list doesn't seem to have an exit door) requesting me to please refrain from using the term "open source."
Like hell I'll stop using it.
OSI = ESR = Cathedral + Bazaar = many eyes make light work = open source
There is nothing wrong with the term, but there is everything wrong with the interviewee's analysis of it. I'll stick with ESR because even though he likes guns, he doesn't point one at me, be it real or moral.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
An explanation: dictators and "fundementalists" seized the power. It happens all the time. If you were looking at Africa, then you would deduce that democracy is nice in theory, but there is absolutly no way it can work in practice. But that's not true, if you look in other parts of the world. In fact, even in Europe, in France, it took about one century, several revolutions, and a half-dozen constitutions to reach real democracy after the first revolution.
And certainly the Terror which occured a few years after this first one, is extremely similar to the fight against "counter-revolution" in Russia (and to go even further Macarthism is remotly similar in spirit). Not to mention that a few years after this terror, came a dictator (but somewht populat), called Napoleon started huge wars against most of Europe, which caused about 3 million deaths.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was founded exactly for the reason to make Free Software compatible with business people's thinking, and the word "freedom" has been considered harmful for that purpose.
This is a very scary statement. Suddenly, all my lefty-liberal theories don't seem so nutty after all.
>>
I had to stop reading at this point. Appart from the GPL, the "non free" project most militant about its license is OpenBSD. Security requires transparency about your methods, yet obscurity about your deployment. Nobody in the security business goes around advertising the location of their sensitive parts.
OpenBSD was not created for business.
Let's look at OpenSSH. There are compilation options which allow you to defeat, at compile time, features you don't wish to deploy. There options are in a header file. If you change this header file, you have changed the source. Haven't you? If OpenBSD were under the GPL, I guess you'd have to publish those changes. Wouldn't you?
It's quite possible to embed in source code all kinds of information which other people have no need or right to know. OpenBSD does a great job of keeping the rights parts of the source code free to inspection. That hardly makes OpenBSD the "running dog" of corporate perversity as this interview seems to imply.
And, no, "Open Source" is not an accurate characterization of this faction, since their focus has been making Free Software compatible with business people's thinking. A more correct name would have been "Free Software for Business" - or something like that.
(Some dumb parser in
But alternative paths to the gift society exist. It is not necessary everyone is able to produce anything, that scarcity is no more a major factor in "economics" (calling trade *that* would then be an oxymoron) is sufficient. Exploitation of outer space, a huge productivity boost due to super-intelligence, almost unlimited energy, sufficiently advanced genetic engineering...all could elminitae scarcity on primary goods on a global scale.
OTOH, even if nanotech is avaliable to build a replicator, if replicators are scarce it won't do any good on reducing scarcity of other goods.
Anyway, it all actually boils down to "is greed a primary human motive? if it is, can it be controlled?" I have no answers to those questions; I'm just a capitalist pig, exploiting workers and driving a SUV.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Get your bets in on when people will stop trying to define what is happening here in this natural evolution of software development (using terms that are not advanced enough to correctly identify it, not to mention communicate it accurately and in simple terms.)
Man has developed societies over time, in order to deal with growing complexities of population growth. Perhaps the tower of babel was one such example where a problem developed in complexity?
But we learn how to overcome such problems (who knows maybe we will overcome the language barrier, thru some new and improved portable babelfish speach to text to speech converter).
And in overcomming such problems encountered in the growing population of society, we build upon common ground what we have as a whole.
In the software industry, where does this "common ground" that we are building upon exist?
Consider the roads/highways in the US, where would business be if there weren't such common pathways of the quality and quantity of US roads?
And where does the money to build and maintain such roads come from?
As others have correctly pointed out, software is unlike any other product, it's non-physical in essence, though recorded upon very inexpensive media, perhaps even pencil and paper.
MicroSoft is a good example of trying to build a tower of babel into the heavens.
Instead the natural evolution of software development is building the highway that can handle the weight and transport alot more than a stairway or elevator can.
When Bill Gates yelled piracy, he in effect cause a distraction, a detour of this natural evolution and by the carrot of money. But that was when the software industry was small enough to do so in even gaining money hungry followers to help sustain the distraction, the detour.
Much of this works that trys to explain what is going on here, does so based on the current market share. Look back what others were saying even 5 or 6 years ago and realize this. Then project forward and realize that companies like Microsoft who want to control the road/highway with toll stations, simply will not exist. Instead they wil be more like vechicle manufactures (or at least that's a good distraction for them at this time.)
Without this common ground highway, we simply cannot go as far as the population demands. And the population is going to do what is good for it, rather than for the self selected few who want to put up toll booths. Even governments are more and more supporting the common ground highway as they also need to travel over the highway.
But it's not just software, it's information too, but one thing at a time.
When you say information can't be free you are mistakenly saying that information and the matter in which it manifests itself are the same. This is not correct.
Of course it costs to make a eg. CD, to get the materials, to manufacture the disc, to encode the information to the disc etc. but information in its basic and abstract form, as information, does not cost to you.
You probably know how to make a fire by rubbing two woods together. You probably overheard that somewhere. That information does not cost anything. It exists whether you as the keeper of information die (ie. your brains stop working). Of course there's a cost in keeping your brains working, but the information as such does not cost you more. Cost is always imposed by a human. There is no such thing in natural occurence where you take fruit from a tree and suddenly you have to part with some amount of money.
But the information has not gone anywhere! You can still make a fire by rubbing two woods together.
I don't think I'm making sense.. but whatever.
What has this article got to do with nationalism? Is the author trying to make some backhand comment about the nations that might not agree with the article, or more likely they don't have the faintest idea what "jingoistic" means.
Open Source software vs. Microsoft/Apple software.
/. only goes to show that most programmers are really great at what they do... but they aren't particularly wise.
Ask yourself, would you rather write great code for yourself, and thus sell it for your own benefit... Or - would you rather be a Micro$oft or Apple employee? Now from the customer end - would you rather agree to the Micro$oft license or the Open Source License? Which one allows you the best options? Which one places you in danger of losing your privacy and even inaliable rights? Which is more expensive? Which is free?
Why these questions cause giant flame wars on
P.S. I love using the word inaliable because the M$ spell checker doesn't understand it. Curious no?
One problem is proprietary software like qmail which is open source but no more free to change than something like MS office.
People look after their own self interests. People will not reach out and help others until they are certain they have "enough", and that is a little more than they feel is necessary for others to have. Capitalism works because it is based on the idea that people will look after themselves. This is also why Capitalism needs to be restrained to prevent people's selfishness from oppressing others. This so called "GPL Society" assumes that people are naturally good and will share equally. Not true! It is a society that will not work.
The most important idea presented by oekonux is that the personal expression and free creative developmental environment of free software is more important to many people than making additional money in their spare time.
This can be compared also with pro-suming of the 80 s, where decorating your house and doing some handcrafts would be more preferred then staying in office or making money with a second job.
He makes a bunch of excellent points, and then he says this:
"Another important factor is that capitalism is in deep crisis.Until the 1970s capitalism promised a better world to people in the Western countries, to people in the former Soviet bloc and to the Third World. It stopped doing it starting in the 1980s and dismissed it completely in the 1990s. Today the capitalist leaders are glad if they are able to fix the biggest leaks in the sinking ship."
By what measure is it failing? My preferred measure of well being is life expectancy: it correlates well with income, and is a good general, objective measure of quality of life. In has increased from 42 to 49 in sub Saharan Africa, from 53 to 64 in the undeveloped countries and from 71 to 76 in the first world.
What's another good measure? Let's use people in extreme poverty. It's remained relatively constant since 1950 at about 1.2 billion people. At the same time, the population of the world more than doubled. In other words, the world gained about 3.4 billion "not poor" people.
Open source will change the world, and it will change economics. But in the realm of scarce goods, capitalism works. No other century in history was as good for the human race as the 20th, despite the efforts of Hitler (6 million Jews), Stalin (20 million Ukrainians and rural Russians) and Mao (30 million)
Bryan
Which article is first and second here?! And where the heck do you get this "second coming of Socialism" nonsense?
The article on firstmonday.org not once suggested that Free Software would undermine Capitalism, in fact showed why the existence of Free Software was essentially a product of traditional capitalist theory-- and sought to criticize works like ESRs C&B insomuch as C&B promoted the notion that Free Software was the result of some radical shift in culture specific to hackers.
The article at govtech.com clearly discusses why several world governments are looking at Free Software, and their primary reasons are national pride and national security-- with an emphasis on the latter. They don't want to be beholden to an American corpooration, especially when that company might either purposefully (with backdoors) or accidentally (by hiding mistakes until too late) compromise national security in those nations.
Neither of these articles puts any weight behind a single economic or political system or another. Simply because China is nominally Communist, this reflects nothing about their reasons for adopting Linux. Germany and France are both in the Linux-leaning camp and they are both solid democracies and capitalist economies.
I do not have a signature
My apologies... for some reason I thought I was in the comments section for the government security and linux story!
I do not have a signature
So if I disagree that this is in any way enlightening, that makes me non-free thinking and jingoistic? What a biased, bigoted thing to say. In other words, anyone who doesn't espouse the neo-Marxist views expressed in this interview is labled a jingoist?
How typical of left/liberal thinking; if you don't agree with us, you are a bad person! LOL.
I love how Jizzbug implies that if you don't like this article, you're a close-minded nationalist. That's an underhanded way to try to get people to agree with you -- akin to saying "if you don't vote for my repressive 'anti-terrorist' legislation, you hate America".
Which is funny, because I would have enjoyed and agreed with the article -more- if I hadn't felt someone would be pissed if I didn't.
Of course I'm right, and if you don't agree, you're a pedophile.
The enemies of Democracy are
A capitalist would not support state sponsorship of monopolies. Anyone who does is, necessarily, not a capitalist, but rather a corporate socialist. The Italian term for corporate socialist in the late 1930's was fascist (though it didn't mean then what it later came to mean under the Schicklegruber influence).
(Yeah, I probably spelled that name wrong. He's not worth looking it up, and his nickname is banned.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You're shooting yourself in the foot spewing crap like that. Money makes the world go round and even those who think they are doing something for free have to pay their bills somehow. Unless you're Stallman and have others donating money to pay your bills. but those others are making money somewhere. Try going to Fry's and telling they should give you a new computer, because you write free software. Go read some Ayn Rand and learn to be proud to be paid for hard work and intelligent thought.
Point me to this farmer who sits down and invents a generator from scratch and then tell me who's running his farm while he carries out the research involved, fool. The patents have long since expired on generators and most modern irrigation systems, but these things would not have reached their current level of development if they had depended on the work of amateurs rather than companies with lawyers and bankers.
Imagine that nobody could build roads or water systems or electric plants unless they paid royalties to some American company for the idea
Congratulations, you're imagining the USA in the period of Edison and Westinghouse. For electricity distribution, that is (the major patents on which have long since expired). If on the other hand, you think that "water systems" were invented by American companies, you're either too much of an idiot to warrant further conversation or rudely refusing to think seriously about history.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
"All the revolutions you mentioned would not be popular without the discontented masses."
It should read:
All the revolutions you mentioned would not be possible without the discontented masses.
I did not proofread.
What most people don't realize is that we have entered a new age. Capitalism and Communism are about the Iron age and talk about control over the means of production.
In a new age it is meaningless to talk about things in terms of the previous age. This would be the equivalent of talking about CEOs' in terms of divine right.
Capitalism only exists for material goods that have scarcity. Communism is about workers controlling the means of production.
Well, I own dozens of computers. I own computers that are more powerful than super computers of just 20 years ago. I have instant communications with anyone in the world. I can protect my files from any power in the world for at least a few years.
In the information age I have more power than the most powerful men in the world just 50 years before.
This communication has allowed us to develop software products that rival those from capitalist developers costing billions of dollars to produce. And we share that software between us all, effectively sharing billions of dollars of wealth.
If you can't find a way to make a living off of these resources, then you really aren't trying very hard.
My granddad and three associates built a car from the ground up. That was back when everyone in the country wanted to start a car company. There were 200 established automobile makers by the early '20s, and many more attempts - like granddad's - that didn't quite establish themselves.
What happenned of course was Henry Ford, and the assembly line were the individual worker didn't have to know how to build a car from the ground up, but just how to put together a small piece of it as it got to his station on the assembly line.
Free software has some resonance with Ford's method. While Linus built a kernel "from the ground up," a lot of the effectiveness of the method is because one guy can stay at one station and just work on a single, special-purpose utility (say, fetchmail). That's how must of it happens - individuals or small teams working on something only they need to fully understand, because it fits in a standardized framework - apt-get or rpm or ./configure-make-make install is all the general building capability most folks need.
The odd thing about Ford was that, while he devised a system for people with less knowledge and capability, individually, to be more productive, he didn't pay them less - instead he paid them several times more than what workers with much more knowledge and ability were getting working in "build each one from the ground up" car concerns. He response to the supposed "alienation of labor" was to be sure his labor could afford the cars they were building, and so not be alienated from them.
Of course, by the '30s Ford was a big Hitler fan - he really believed in sweeping, utopian reorganizations of society. And of course the issue in software isn't between building from the ground up or just filling one station well, but between starting with a vehicle resistant to customization deeper than the paint (or wallpaper), and one that's easy to hotrod, with many custom parts and plans available - one with more freedom.
Anyone bringing Marx into this should specify in what way Marx was wrong when he declared that "freedom" is just capitalist ideological cover, and valuing freedom to be "false consciousness." The real historical motion has been, long term, towards more freedom - the essence of capitalism is freedom in the markets for both goods and capital. Free software is nothing but the further extension of the historical wave of freedom. As such, what can it learn from Marx, who thought freedom a cruel fraud, and wanted societies to retreat from it?
It is the hope of every fascist, marxist and fundamentalist that people will back off from their movement towards ever greater spheres of freedom. Free software is a small way of saying no to their dreams of retreat for the many, and enthronement for themselves.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Anyone who is driven in the software industry to create a situation in which everything is free simply does not understand human nature. Benefits arise from curiosity, whether those benefits are money or ego or status. And the production of energy and ideas in a human body is not free either (i.e. you need to eat and be able to afford your computers)
Money is not going to go away any time soon. It may turn into something that is no longer just faith, but it is not going anywhere. There are two problems that Marxists (of any color) can never seem to grasp:
Things as complex as economies, countries, and even corporations just don't change overnight and they don't generally change in huge extremes. Most software might become open source, but most of it will never quite be free as the market redistributes itself. I've said that I'm more than willing to pay an independent programmer ten bucks for his widget but that I've never paid Adobe the hoards of money they want for their behemoths (most of the features of which I don't and can't use).
========Shsssh! Don't mention the native Americans! Oh, but I forgot. It was
OK to slaughter them, 'cause we're the Good Guys (TM).
Of course it takes time - the couple of seconds that it takes to hand it to someone is valuable. But the net effect for him to "spend the time" for the exchange is greatly outweighed by the benefit of picking that money up.
$100 - a second of his time = him being a fucking idiot to not take the cash.
No enlightenment here. Moving along...
Jeff
the propaganda that had streamed into the USSR was that they'd be better off if they were a capitalist democracy. Well, now they are a capitalist democracy now and they aren't better off. Their economy - such as it was - was going down the toilet anyway.
You can't call capitalism what they practice in the former USSR. (Well, I don't know about the Baltic republics) I have heard those systems called kleptocracies ("rule by robbers"). The privatization was directed onto powerful politicians and their friends. State monopolies have become private monopolies. It's hard to tell politicians, mafia and businessmen. I read that if somebody wants to abide byt the Russian tax laws, they should pay >100% of the earnings.
Rule of law, fair trials, and equal opportunity are part of capitalism. The former USSR is far from that.
European ex-communist countries can be a better example of transition to capitalism. (Excluding former Yugoslavia).
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
The various atrocities perpatrated against the Native Americans are inexecusable. Possibly communists have just been more effeceint because they could take advantage of twentieth century technology.
The Assyrians also had a fairly bloody reputation, and the Chinese Emperors deported whole populations several times.
Still, communism seems to breed mass murder like no other.
1. Free Software is both inside and outside capitalism. On the one hand, the social basis for Free Software clearly would not exist without a flourishing capitalism. Only a flourishing capitalism can provide the opportunity to develop something that is not for exchange. On the other hand, Free Software is outside of capitalism for the reasons I mentioned above: absence of scarcity and self-unfolding instead of the alienation of labor in a command economy.
2. It seems you're talking about the difference between use value - the use of goods or labor - and exchange value - reflected in the price of the commodities that goods or labor are transformed into by being sold on the market.
3. In Free Software because the product can be taken with only marginal cost and, more importantly, is not created for being exchanged, the exchange value of the product is zero. Free Software is worthless in the dominant sense of exchange. 4. The more production is done by machines the less human labor is needed in the production process. 5. A GPL Society would not be based on exchange, there would be no need for money anymore
For those who wish to write Open Source software for a living (yeah, that means earning money): Do OSS consulting and provide people with complete hardware/software solutions for all their needs. If something doesn't exist, develop it yourself and somehow tack that onto their bill, even if it's just labeled as a raw labor cost. Guaranteed, they'll still be saving boatloads of money in comparison to proprietary solutions which must be replaced every couple years. And if enough OSS geeks start doing this, it'll become easier for everyone since less of the needed software will be missing when starting out on a job. Granted, there will always be in-house programming customizations to do, but they too will become smaller.
If you truly believe in Open Source, become a master programmer make it your livelihood. Word will spread quickly if you do a much better job than all those MSCE certified dolts and help businesses reduce their fixed costs in the process. And if you find yourself earning too much money, you can always take a year off for leisure, personal education, and coding on pet projects. Sounds like a dream, but its not. However, first you must move beyond the mental box that says the only "stable job" is working 9-5 making somebody else rich. Small, flexible business are the key to the further expansion of already successful OSS.
What about those of us who are not freethinking and who are jingoistic?
Talk about flame bait... Geez!
Edith Keeler Must Die
The marxists all around the world started protesting the automation and computerization because it is supposed to make humans irrelevant. In front of their eyes people got more employment and now they are manifesting themselves as neo-marxists advocating free software initiated Utopia!
I refuse to subject myself to this delusions of grandeur as much as I refuse to belive the capitalists!
Our favorite villain corporation wants a settlement whereby they would be allowed to continue their illegal business practices against their most dangerous competitor, namely Open Source.
:-)
From what I understand, it's got something to do with Open Source not "being a business". They seem to acknowledge that a business has the right to compete freely with them, but Open Source does not.
What every American kid learns in grade school is the phrase "free enterprise", not "free business". MS's business model is wonderfully broken in today's world, and good old Darwinian selection should be allowed to decide which is the fittest type of software enterprise.
Look up the word "enterprise" at dict.org.
Most of the entries use words like "activity", "courage", "boldness", "energy". Great name for a spaceship
Ironically, it is only a recent entry from "The Free Online Dictionary of Computing" which equates "enterprise" with "business".
The only fair way to distribute commodities/power is by MERIT. Not "to each according to need, from each according to ability" but "to each according to his ability". Charity is a fine thing, but not if there's a gun to the giver's head - then it's facism and tyranny. Who gets the beach house, the prime rib, the nice car? Or would nobody get them? Or would you get them, Comrade? We can't eat software yet, whether it's free or not. And just because you're "self-actualized" doesn't mean you're worth a shit.
It is very dishonest, and exact opposite of open source. The GPL specifically is about me making decisions about code and information in my posession, and those who I interact with that noone else can impose on me wether "enlightened" or not.
When people talk about the freedom to copy, it is not like the false freedom for me to move into your house or impose on your resources. One is an infinite resource, the other very limited. Making them like they're the same is simply dishonest, and then going a step further and equating it to Marxisim (which promotes the latter) is even more dishonest.
Guile allows you to create GTK+ programs in a GUI interface (point and click your way around widget creation). Is that what you mean?
Jordan Bettis
Maybe I'm ignorant, but that sounds exactly like capitalism to me. Those who were able to sieze opportunities at the right time, have been able to profit greatly. Meanwhile, those with no power, who had no opportunity, or who were too moral to take it, have suffered.
I'm not seeing what the rule of law or fair trials have to do with capitalism. Those are ideals of fair government. Equal opportunity is a false promise of those who promote capitalism, because they are in a good position to take advantage of the system. Yeah, equal opportunity is a nice dream, but if you look around you will see that not since the beginning of time have individuals had what could truly be called EQUAL opportunity. The world just does not work that way. Some people have some advantages, some have others and, others have neither. So, taking that starting point and applying capitalism, you get what you see in the former USSR. That is unregulated capitalism. What regulates capitalism so that those situations don't arrise? Ohh, governments do. Who else is going to put a check on rampant brutal capitalism. No one.
The problem then is, what do you do if the greediest capitalists also control the government? You either bend over and take it, fight for control of your government, or you scratch and claw your way to the top.
All hail the holy ideal of capitalism!!
I think you just got it.
[Life expectancy] has increased from 42 to 49 in sub Saharan Africa
What planet do you live on? Life expectancy is falling like a stone in sub-Saharan Africa. A half century of progress has been erased by HIV/AIDS.
No other century in history was as good for the human race as the 20th, despite the efforts of Hitler (6 million Jews), Stalin (20 million Ukrainians and rural Russians) and Mao (30 million)
Please don't forget to include the 28 million currently sentenced to die by the WTO.
While capitalism may not be a sinking ship, it is failing to guard its own future. Capitalism is good at sharing its diseases with the poor nations, and not very good at sharing the cure. By aggressively defending intellectual property rights, capitalism is a snake swallowing its own tail.
Um, isn't the whole point of Open Source/Free software the people do creative, and even boring work (bug fixes), for free because they have autonomy in approach, they feel custodianship over the project, and because they are allowed to be creative?
There is something very wrong with society when you need to put a gun to a head or bribe with money to make people work.
The whole point of open source is that people are not inherently lazy, but thrive and do creative stuff if given freedom. Think of the gloom and depression the facsist organisation of work under capitalism creates - can you say repetivite mindless tasks?
Capitalism does NOT have some kind of monopoly on "creativity" or "Prosperity" or "Trade". Capitalism just stands for a few (very few) parasites sucking blood from the rest of humanity. Open Source/Free software is proving that capitlism infact stifles potential creativity and efficiency and security. This has implication beyond software and computers, perhaps it hints at a BETTER way to organise work and society! That's the real point.
As for you assertion that anti-WTO protestors are violent - well the powers-that-be have got you hook, line & sinker boy!
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
All of you who think communism is outdated but think capitalism is a scam (it is) should take a look at this.
Why was this moded down? it is not flaimbait.
"Only successful capitalists have time to create things which do not contribute to their survival."
You probably want to re-think that one.
reading this article reminds me of ideas and philosophies expressed and explored by robert prisig (mostly in lila, his follow up book to zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance) and by buckminster fuller in his various books
fuller in that scarcity is an outmoded mind-think and that through technological sophistication and a focus on life-enabling tech rather than life-destroying tech (i.e. military) we can attain abundance for all
pirsig in his idea of increasing static levels of morality - per se - atomic -> biological -> social -> intellectual
importantly pirsig explicitly and fuller implicitly showed that it is wrongheaded to attack the levels below (and especially the most recent level below) as they have their own intrinsic morality and have provided th foundations for th new transcendent expression
so i like how in th article th interviewee also stresses how capitilism has enabled th new emergent mind-think to emerge - and will keep enabling it
th moral of th story is not to get ideological and see it as a struggle between capitalism and gpl-society - it is only a struggle if we perceive it as such and if by our arrogance we engender resentment
- one does not stand in front of a lion and proclaim loudly how one is fundamentally more evolved than it does one? - no, one simply takes precautions not to arouse a lion's interest and keep out of harms way knowing that th lion has it's place too
perhaps this is th lesson th romans were trying to teach the christians? :)
That prompts me to think that anyone bringing Marx into argument should be able to explain what commodity fetichism is.
That for you freedom applies to goods and capital, and not to labor and humans, indicates to me the continuing truth expressed by Victor Serge:
"You love things too much and people too little
people as people you love not enough."
"If the Third World would get on board, clean up their corrupt governments and change the culture of always wanting a handout, maybe capitalism would work for them."
Wow! What a point of view!
Had it ever occurred to you that some countries may be poor not because they are a bunch of freeloading lazy bastards but because they lack natural resources? What are they going to do, start a sand factory? How much is a sack-o-sand going for these days?
Its unbelievable how people ignore the fact that the U.S. has always had a leg up due to the enormous natural resources at hand. Iron ore, fertile land, oil and don't forget all the sand! Boy did we make a killing on that!
I still am curious how one can speak of 'freedom' yet restrict the rights of others. I suppose I should just go invite myself in to your home and fuck your wife, drink your beer and beat your dog... because I want to. Communism had its day people, it was PROVEN not to work. Now either help the truly enlightened people that wish to EDUCATE everyone and from there improve society, or get your self-serving, rhetoric spewing, lying, inconsistent, illogical asses out of the way. Stop trying to sound like marters and heroes when you are only really interested in dressing up your self serving ambitions up in pretty sounding rhetoric.
I thought that Marxism and Communism were not ideals, but social theories. As such, they can either be right or wrong; good and evil seem out of the question. Wasn't Marx a "scientific materialist" after all?
The question of whether Marxism is right or wrong has not been answered. The question of whether Communism was wrong seems to have been answered, by history, in the affirmative.
To answer either question one has to analyze the fundamental assumptions of both theories, and see whether they make sense or not. The basis of Marxism had little to do with the benefit of mankind (that was an inevitable consequence). It was at a scientific theory of society and history, and it claimed that at some point social equality would be a natural consequence of the development of history.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
"So the development of Free Software is based on the self-unfolding or self-actualization of the single individual. "
:-))
When we look at other sideof software development
the question is why Bill Gates entered into sw development. Was it for self-actulaization or was it a "communist" activity to maximize profit for the Microsoft community or himself ? What does he feel when the media reports he is one of the richest man!? ( after all the hard hours his employees put, for a thank you
The question in front of us now is do we need to maximize profit or knowledge.
How did this post get modded so high? You call Stefan a Marxist utopian, when in fact he is an anarchist. Big difference guys. You would think that Slashdot readers would understand the difference, but I think all the old schoolers moved out. Slashdot = Newbieland. The old guard understand the difference between Marxism and anarchism; they understand that anarchist techies are widespread and that they have been pretty important to maintaining the gift economy that used to be a celebrated facet of the Internet.
Capitalism works for those with the most wealth. It doesn't work for most of the world.
With the exception of an addictive drug whose withdrawal symptoms never go away at all will inevitably lead to death (none such exist, though a nicotine/barbiturate hybrid would come close), or a medicine needed to stave off AIDS or Magog egg development, no luxury one might lack can possibly become as "paramount" as food and water when there isn't enough. If you think not, I think you're thinking about a different species.
If you can accept that (and if you can't, fast for five days and get back to me, we can compare notes), I think you can accept the qualitative difference between a world in which minimal human needs are relatively sure to be met (regardless of how much a loser or lazy slob you are---"lazy" can mean "feverishly doing work no-one else cares about", and this decade's loser may be the next's visionary) and one in which any sane person must at root be concerned about how bad things can get.
(Oh, please drink water for those five days; this is illustrative of another principle: Most games work better if the losers don't die.)
No European I've met is at root as bugfuck crazy as all but the richest Americans I've met. Maybe that's why they're sane enough not to care about their public figures' religious beliefs, not go to church much themselves, and (finally) have got a bit sane about (at least some) drugs...I'd trade a little loss of ambition for that; these are goods which are worth they're price on the market, and I think more oof my countrymen would agree with this if the bargain were shewn accurately and regularly....
Looks like it is the plot of Chines communists :-)
to breakdown capitalist symbols like Microsoft!!
Microsoft, Watch out these eveil people
100 percent code into robot
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
In my opinion, the most important thing to note about the "free software" paradigm is that it has a greater tendency to produce software with particular utility for the people creating it, while proprietary software companies will produce software with utility to the consumers. Take a walk through the software aisle in Best Buy any day and take a look at what dominates. Games. I, and many others, have noted that games are not the strong suite of Linux. (Don't get me wrong; Tux Racer is great, but you can only play those few levels so many times.) When highly complex, highly graphical games to Linux, it is usually because a "Cathedral model" company has decided to release it. To contrast, I have never seen anything on the level of Myst or (pick any popular game, I don't play computer games) coming from the free software society,and I don't expect to either. One possibility for this in the open source community would be to hand-pick designers to handle particular aspects of the game, but this is not the "bazaar" we treasure so.
On the other hand, Linux comes with a formidably full toolbox, and all of these tools are excellent of what free software is good at making.
Enough rambling... back to work.
You can call this o/s development "efficient" alright, but where there's no money involved, where people are not employed to do the work, and paid wages, where there's no-one making a profit on a financial investment, then I'm afraid it has nothing at all to do with capitalism. Of course in some o/s efforts these things are present, but they are by no means essential feature.
I realise that a lot of this open-source development goes on in "capitalist" countries, but that does not in itself make it a capitalist practice, either. Consider domestic work done on a voluntary basis. I live in a capitalist country, and last night I did the dishes and cooked dinner, but that didn't make it capitalist work. I was not paid to do this work, and the results of my work were not for sale. I actually gave a bowl of pasta to my partner merely because she wanted it. Of course some people are paid to cook, but most cooking is done on a voluntary basis outside of the sphere of capitalist relationships.
Also, a lot of software development work is done in nominally "socialist" countries, but in itself that doesn't necessarily make it "socialist" production either.
The question of what the participants think of it is not relevant either. If programmers write code without pay and give the results away to society generally, then that makes it "communist production", irrespective of the political beliefs of the workers involved.
I agree that artificial scarcity (="intellectual property") must be ended.
It seems to me that
Roll on communism!
marx was a nerd. what did he mean by the fruits of the universal human spirit, then? he meant that the fruits of the labor of the minds of thinkers was not for sale as an end-product. on the other hand his theory proves that communists are capitalists, as they hoard political power to trade it for all other forms of power. and yet he exercised free speech to voice his theory or opinions. what does this mean for the publishing industry or for academia?! i suppose he would not have enivsioned LLP./
This is coming form someone who most likely has never created anything worth a copyright in their entire life, and is addicted to some napster-clone or has taken open source zelotry a bit too far.
Please, go yell, "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE! FREE I TELL YOU, FREE!" somewhere else. I'm all fine and dandy with you creating something and placing it in the public domain, but you're crossing the line when you expect everyone else to put what they've made in the public domain, whether they like it or not.