Slashdot Mirror
Tocqueville Blames U.S. IT Troubles On Free Software
twitter writes "The group that told us closed source was more secure than open source, now tells us that "Open source software, also described as free software, is the neutron bomb of IP" that will destroy 85% of the market value of US companies and drive companies who are currently outsourcing to "draconian measures even worse than outsourcing." So, there you have it, free software is responsible for bad laws, out sourcing and bad hair days." (Remember who funded the same group's report on open source security?)
> "The report warns governments
> against relying on open-source software
Since the government is busy sponsoring open source software, I think this warning falls (happily) on deaf ears.
The Army reading list
Read Selling Free Software from GNU. As I said in my other post, noone ever seems to bother to actually read the things RMS and GNU puts out.
I'm not really karma whoring with this link; just trying to get more people to read this so we can actually see informed discussions instead of misunderstandings like this.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
That's like saying 'real feudalism (i.e. a kingdom of God in which the Church and the monarchy are acting by divine rule), as opposed to the corrupt, rapine, impoverished system that passed for feudalism in the middle ages'. Perfect competition has never existed and will never exist. It is a model, for use in economic theory, that is intended to represent a theoretical tendency.
In REAL capitalism, i.e. the real, actual, existing economic system, since its birth several hundred years ago, (as Adam Smith repeatedly points out in Wealth of Nations incidentally) firms constantly attempt to influence and control goverment to pursue their own profit maximisation goals. This includes raising tariffs when they want them (i.e. against competitors) and lowering them when they are a problem (i.e. for export markets). Manipulation of politics for profit maximisation is and always has been a feature of REAL capitalism, and the inevitable result of this is non-free markets (although even without it, markets would not be 'perfect' as we do not have perfect information, 0 barriers to entry, etc).
John Maynard Keynes was an idiot. He convinced many governments that the way to create wealth was to print money
Keynesianism does not argue that the way to create wealth is to print money. It argues that the government should correct the cyclical fluctuations of the capitalist economy by creating countercyclical expansions and contractions--borrowing and spending in periods of contraction, paying off the debt in periods of expansion, not printing money, but trying to stabilise the economy through spending. Don't get the neoclassical synthesis (today's ISLM model) confused with original Keynesianism. There's a big difference.
And John Maynard Keynes was not an idiot; even if you disagree with him, he was ahead of his time.
Did you even read what I wrote?
First off, you're not a libertarian.
Sure I am. I'm currently a minarchist libertarian, but learning towards anarchist, also known as anarcho-capitalist.
There's more than one kind of libertarian, you know. Those who, like me, disagree with intellectual property laws are still a minority within the movement, but we are a significant minority. Here's a good discussion of the issue. Here's some more perspective. Saying libertarians are all agreed on the issue and that I'm not a libertarian because of my position on this is a misrepresentation. As Eric Raymond says, the non-coercion principle is about the only thing all libertarians agree on.
Secondly, a basic government is needed to protect property rights (that's a tenent of Libertariansim)
You're dismissing an entire branch of libertarianism, there. Anarcho-libertarians do not believe a basic government is needed, at all, or believe that government itself should be demonopolized (allowing a choice between any number of independent governments in a geographic area, or starting your own). Now, most of the ones I hear from still seem to believe in intellectual property, but I'm at a loss as to how intellectual property law is to be enforced in anarchy.
Furthermore, as I said in my post (did you read it?), I do not believe "intellectual property" is a property right. Nowhere in our legal code is it acknowledged as a right; it is a gift from the public encoded in the Constitution NOT because people have an "inherent right" to their ideas, but in order to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. (Did you read the Constitution?)
Your assumption is that everybody wants to code for free, which is utter bullshit.
Where did I say that? Strawman, or else you're reading somebody else's post.
I don't code for free, but I don't produce proprietary software, either. Something like 70% or more of the coding industry is not jobs for software makers like Microsoft or your favorite game company but coding custom software that is only of interest to one particular company. This will never go away; intellectual property laws have zero bearing on whether this kind of work needs to be done or not. Furthermore, removing the government-monopoly grant of intellectual property would radically change the software industry but not destroy it. Free software is demonstrating that. We are slowly approaching the point where, even with the protection of the government grant of exclusive rights "for a time," proprietary software will be unable to compete on price, features, performance, or TCO with Free software. That's the point of the whole article from Tocqueville! They see Free software as a neutron bomb that will "kill" the industry. What it will do is not kill it, but change it forever. There will still be money to be made in Free software. And even if not, people still have the right to give their "intellectual property" away for free, so this change is going to happen anyway.
How do you propose protecting the rights of people who develop software and want to sell it?
I do not believe anyone has a right to a profit at any particular business model, nor do I believe anyone has an exclusive right to an idea they have originated, thus I do not propose protecting these alleged "rights." (I do, of course, believe in protecting all the same rights for everybody, so they'd have the same basic rights as you and me.)
Meanwhile, it's not impossible to make money selling Free software. Why don't you do some reading some time?
so all software development is in the hands of people who happen to have the time and mone
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.