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Open Source Could Learn from Capitalism
ukhackster writes to tell us that Sun's Simon Phipps challenged many open source ideals at a recent open source conference in London. Urging the open source community to look to the lessons of capitalism, Phipps called for "volunteerism" to be replaced with "directed self-interest" and denounced the perceived legal issues surrounding open source. From the article: "Phipps took time out to take a swipe at some of the exhibitors at the conference who were selling professional advice on negotiating the open source 'legal minefield'. 'I disagree with those who say who say open source is a legal minefield,' he said as he threw from the stage a brochure from one firm of lawyers. 'If you think open source is a minefield you're doing it wrong.'"
Whether FOSS is "capitalist" or "communist" or "volunteerist" is completely irrelevant, and quite frankly I think anyone who constantly tries to hammer the FOSS square peg into one of those round holes is doing so for their own purposes.
FOSS is what it is. In some ways, it's capitalist, in others, it's communist, in others, it's volunteerist. That's really the beauty of the movement; you get out of it what you want to get out of it, and you put into it what you want to put into it.
Maybe that's anarchy. Or maybe that's just another way of saying "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." The question is, why does it matter?
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Free Software is about securing freedom; keeping yourself free is a self-interest.
Any good capitalist will trumpet their value based on supply and demand. Then when someone decides to give something away they'll cry like babies. Remember the banks suing the credit unions.
Yes absoluetly people have the right to make free software. And as long as dedicated hobbyists are willing to give it away for the sake of personal satisfaction and being able to control their tools, the corporate guys are going to have to work harder.
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Last time I checked, many open source people were pretty capitalistic. I guess the rumor keeps floating around that everybody's a commie or something, but it simply isn't true. I'm a laissez-faire capitalist, and therefore I love open source.
Phipps called for "volunteerism" to be replaced with "directed self-interest"
When you really get down to it, there's no difference. People "volunteer" because they get something out of it, whether it be financial, utility, entertainment, or the satisfaction of simply "making the world a better place."
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
...does not qualify as directed self-interest?
The same applies to companies - Sun didn't make OO.org open-source out of the goodness of its heart; it did so to strike back at Microsoft.
There shouldn't be the firm line Phipps draws between volunteerism and "directed self-interest" - they're interelated. They always have been. They probably always will be.
In the last twenty years, the real wages for college educated US workers have barely
kept up with inflation. Outside the US, the situation is even worse in the majority of cases in those countries that have followed the so-called free market solutions to economic and social problems. Meanwhile, as the majority hang out to dry, the profits for those involved in capitalism proper, eg capital instensive ventures, have doubled dozens of times over. The only lesson capitalism seems to offer is that under a capitalist system, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. How long does it take this guy to get that lesson?
I meant to say that open source should be about writing software, *not* making money or protecting freedom.
(O/T: You would think the Slashdot maintainers would eventually catch on and let people edit posts.)
It's about freedom, and yes it's about liberalism. Although it might be clear for most people I'd like to stress that the threat to open source software is not capitalism but corporatism, and the state. They're responsible for patents, the DMCA etc.
Now the kind of pressure found in a market economy completly apply to open source. Developpers will migrate from one project to another as interest and popularity shifts etc. There is an evolutionnary process very similar to the one found between businesses in market economy, only it is much faster and smoother due to the conditions guaranteeing freedom. Indeed capitalism could learn from open source.
\u262D = \u5350
This comes down to which side of the F/OSS coin you're on. Do you use GNU/Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris, etc. for ideological purposes or because you like it better? Do you define success of F/OSS as having many users or simply having many free software libraries and programs to choose from? (yes, that question is not an either/or)
The open source people are pragmatists. They actually do, for the most part, rely on self interest to get the job done. IBM doesn't really care about the politics behind free software; they just care that it does the job at the lowest cost. There is nothing wrong with this.
For the most part, this distinction doesn't really matter. Those of us in the free software movement who work towards the volunteerism and ideals can work in harmony with those who are directed by self-interest. The only thing that we need to agree on is the license the code is using. The license doesn't require you to buy in to any politics to use the code. Stallman doesn't make you buy into his rhetoric before you get a copy of binutils. This is the great thing about F/OSS; anyone can contribute for any reason, and we all gain from the contribution.
I switched my small consulting business to Linux for very little cost, can expand rapidly, don't have licensing fees, and can find low cost IT labor....This means MORE PROFIT for me and my investors....Low cost input, high value output, nothing is more capitalistic.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a slogan popularized by Karl Marx ... And in a more general sense, the statement comports with capitalist ideas of individual agency and self-interest.
Man, that's a good one. Look, in a market situation, you may have abilities you don't feel like selling, and you may have needs you can't possibly meet (or, far more likely, a wildly distorted sense of the word "need" means - as in, "I really need that new Sony console.").
Any system that purportes to externally gauge what each person's abilities and needs are, and allocates according to that, is the farthest thing from a capitalist, market economy. What if you have an entire city full of people who have astounding abilities to perform ballet, but that's their only ability? That means you've also got a whole lot of skinny dancer types who also happen to have the need for food, HVAC maintenance, appendectomy surgeries, and so on. Central authorities that attempt to size up a situation like that and re-allocate people and resources in a way that doesn't cause friction end up... named Stalin.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Wow, an AC posts completely unsubstantiated 'facts', condems a system that:
- made the US the sole world superpower
- made the West's standard of living what it is
- is responsible for almost every useful innovation of the last 2 centuries
- is lifting 100s of millions out of poverty in China and India
- is the single explanation of the vast economic chasm between North and South Korea
- etc and so on
*and* offers no alternative, yet is already at +4 Insightful.
Nice.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
We seem to be forgetting a fundamental lesson we learned a long time ago. If people share information, everybody is better off. In the middle ages, people jealously guarded any information they had. If you were a doctor or a stone mason, you didn't share with anyone who wasn't in your guild. The result was that society as a whole didn't progress. Everyone was poorer.
Once scientists started to share information by publishing it, technology took off. The capitalist idea of hoarding information and patenting everything and suing everyone is just backward. As another poster noted, it helps the rich get richer but it makes us all poorer.
As long as people are willing to produce foss, it will out-compete proprietary software because the benefits of openness far outweigh the supposed motivational advantage of trying to make a profit.
This is incorrect. In microeconomics or Econ 101 or whatever introductory econ course you end up taking, you'll learn that one of the assumptions of an ideal capitalist system is something called Perfect Information in which every consumer has correct and comprehensive knowledge of the product they are looking to buy. Scamming someone violates the idea of "perfect information" and is the reason we have anti-fraud laws on the books in every capitalist country.
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For some values of the word earn- if you scam someone out of his money, you've "earned" it by the definition of capitalism.
Which definition are you using, exactly? Here's one from the dictionary:
"An economic system based on a free market, open competition, profit motive and private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism encourages private investment and business, compared to a government-controlled economy. Investors in these private companies (i.e. shareholders) also own the firms and are known as capitalists."
And here's some help on the word "scam":
"A fraudulent business scheme; a swindle"
To defraud someone of a dollar is to steal it. Theft is theft under any economic system,, but it's institutionalized under socialism. So... where were you headed with that again?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Unfortunately, we live in the real world, and perfect information doesn't exist (which is one of many reasons why people talking about the free market need to shut up- without perfect information it can't exist). As such, real world capitalism doesn't really care wether you took advantage of a persons lack of information or not.
As an aside- anti-fraud laws predate Adam Smith and the idea of perfect information. SO no, its not the reason we have anti-fraud laws.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
gee, like, only editing before anyone else has replied?
it's not rocket science, folks.
No, that's red communism - party elites rewarded with excess salaries and benefits while the actual capitalists (the shareowners) are scr.w.d six ways to Sunday.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
We disagree on what the definition of open source "prosperity" is. Phipps, as a executive, is thinking entirely in terms of financial prosperity.But what's valuable for Phipps isn't necessarily valuable for open source. In other words, open source's value lies not in the revenues it earns(though that may be what makes it valuable to the private sector), but in the degree to which it is truly open. It is valuable because its sole concern is making available useful products that anyone - not just companies - can modify to suit their needs. As such, it doesn't obey any rigid economic rules or favor any particular economic entity. It is agile, and adapts to many different market circumstances.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think that Phipps' argument here is dangerous for open source. "Connected self-interest" is not something that easily preserves openness. If we take his advice, I see open source gradually being appropriated by private entities to the extent that it becomes indistinguishable from a proprietary product to the outsider. Most corporations tend towards proprietarizing - it fits into a basic principle of capitalism(ownership). This has always been the case, and it runs in direct opposition to the openness which open source seeks to preserve. In any case, until intellectual property and licensing laws are revised, it will be very difficult to achieve the vision for open source of "connected capitalism" that Phipps has, since he seems to be ignoring the whole element of market *competition* and why it creates concerns over what constitutes private property.Open source may be a part of how companies make revenue, but open source *itself* should remain mostly independent and non-profit. That's the only way to preserve its openness, IMHO.
In real life, open source has almost always been driven by self interest; people and companies don't invest years in developing software unless there is open source. That is true even for RMS: his philosophy is the result of self-interest and bad experiences with proprietary software.
But Phipps is wrong when he generically says "there is nothing wrong with self-interest". Con-men act in self-interest, but their actions are not beneficial to society at large. And, in fact, Sun's misrepresentation of the Java licenses and the JCP are an example of how, if you fail to balance your self-interest with ethical behavior, you end up screwing your customers and hurting the community; Sun's self-interest has amounted to establishing a proprietary platform by pretending that it's open, and extracting hundreds of man-years of contributions to a proprietary platform under the false pretense that what these people are creating is "open".
As Sun's business keeps going down the toilet, you can expect more and more of this kind of spin from Schwartz, Phipps, and the other talking heads at Sun. It's clever of them to have their "open source officer" make these statements and attempt to reinforce the stereotype of open source developers as anti-capitalist dreamers. Phipps only needs to look at his company's failing business to see how much open source means business. I'm really looking forward to that company closing its doors.
Sometimes he sells the software, which is a bit like selling a copy of a textbook.
And sometimes the software is free; that's more like an exercise book.
It's usually the warranty; the proposition that my employer will move heaven and earth to keep a client up and running, if he has paid the insurance premium; that's the valuable part.
"Second, if you're a free market type, then you're not in favor of government granted monopolies. The two are contradictory. By definition a "free" market is one with minimal government interference."
Bingo. And yet how many who loudly proclaim to love the free market are also in love with copyrights and patents? And how many advise to let the market solve the problem when people point out issues with goods protected by copyrights or patents.
all the best,
drew
(da idea man)
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He clearly means that it should be okay to not 'share' code as long as the commons is 'enriched'. This is an argument for proprietary software, thinly cloaked. My bet is that he's thinking of licenses that say "You can look at the source code and modify it to fix bugs for your use, and even distribute those bug fixes, but you may not use it to produce a product that competes with ours" - sure, it's better than what they used to offer, but it is just not good enough. It's not free software, it's slightly less painful proprietary software. It's Java - join their developer program and you can see the code, and submit bug fixes, but you can't share the code with anybody.
Here he's arguing that people shouldn't be reimplementing Java (as kaffe, sablevm, etc), but instead 'cooperating' with Sun and working on Sun's proprietary implementation of it. That's what this is probably all about. Sun don't want to release Java as free software, they just want the community to help them develop it.
The message here is: free software is bad, stop doing it because we don't want to play and that means competing implementations which is bad for everyone.
Even the anti-freedom 'pragmatists' would have to admit that it's not really a very convincing message. Creating and maintaining a completely independent code base is, all else aside, ensuring that there is always competition so Sun will continue having to work to stay ahead of them.
This guy wasn't telling open source people to become more capitalist, he was telling capitalist people to do more open source. What he said was to stop thinking of open source as volunteerism and start thinking of it as self-interest -- that is, don't release source because it makes you feel good, release source because it's in your best interest.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I've always thought of OpenSource as presenting a critique of capitalism. A critique not in the sense of rejecting it but of looking at it in a radical way. Radical capitalism would be a return to the principles of Adam Smith - particularly in putting power back in the hands of the small independent producer rather than large Corporations, cartels, monopolies...
Open Source embodies this. People work on OSS and FS projects in their self interest - I don't even know what volunteerism means in this context. There is an element of altruism to be sure but look at SourceForge, freshmeat, etc. Most projects have to do with problems that need to be solved; needs that must be met.
Gate's "Open letter to hobbyists"-style FUD is still the order of the day. Call FSF and OSS communistic as if that means anything today. If it is an attack on anything it is an attack on corporatism. Not capitalism.