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When Libertarians Attack Free Software
binarybits writes 'I've got a new article analyzing the unfortunate tendency of libertarian and free-market organizations to attack free software. The latest example is a policy analyst at the Heartland Institute who attacks network neutrality regulations by arguing that advocates have 'unwittingly bought into' the 'radical agenda' of the free software movement. I argue that in reality, the free market and free software are entirely compatible, and libertarians are shooting themselves in the foot by antagonizing the free software movement.'
I posit that one of the most prized products of Capitalism and the free market is to reduce the cost for the end consumer and raise the quality of the products and services. Now, the scientific formula for deciding the positive effectiveness of this is: (customer's percieved value)/(actual retail cost)
So you can see that as the actual retail cost approaches zero, the positive effects of capitalism approach infinity! Unfortunately when the actual cost is zero, it's undefined and your interpretation may vary.
Basically I suggest open source software people instruct these complaining parties to donate a penny or fraction of a penny to once again make them look like the epitome of our capitalistic system at work. Anyone else (who isn't stupid) may continue to use it for free and -- at least in the case of open source software -- enjoy unparalleled benefits like being able to modify and redistribute the source let alone view it. Problem solved.
My work here is dung.
Liberarians tend to focus on "my freedom" more than on "your freedom".
no, I don't have a sig
Where did you get the idea that these guys are libertatians?
From their about page:
Heartland has been endorsed by some of the country's leading scholars, public policy experts, and elected officials. Dr. Milton Friedman calls Heartland "a highly effective libertarian institute."
Basically they don't want to label themselves as Libertarian because that would foolishly scare away potential non-Libertarians from reading their work. Instead they rely on their publications to speak for their views instead of a label with baggage. If you're an economist, however, you recognize them for what they are: predominantly libertarian with hints of conservatism. Popular knowledge agrees.
My work here is dung.
A better op-ed on this very subject was published by libertarian think thank The Cato Institute over two years ago: http://www.cato.org/tech/tk/070622-tk.html
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
It serves my own purposes. As a developer I am not interested in licensing and IP. That kind of crap is for big corporations. My interests lie in being a paid expert where I go from one company to another and get paid to integrate or fix their free software based products. For small indepedent businesspeople, free software is a major asset. We can share the non-competitive aspects of the software. Operating systems, webservers, etc are all commodities. The important bits are where they are configured and customized for a businesses' needs, rather than licensing the software itself.
Free software isn't socialism, it's the new capitalism. It's the small guy capitalism.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Is it just me, or is anyone else put off by people tooting their own horn by submitting their blog postings as stories? I mean, the guy seems to have something serious to say and seems readable, but geez, let someone else submit it to Slashdot, it doesn't look so much like self-serving aggrandizement or driving your page views up by slashdot effect...
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. -- L. Long
I wrote this here years ago, but it bears repeating: Libertarianism is the carrying out of fascism by other means. The one thing it precisely does not guarantee is liberty.
Ah, but those ten seconds of pure unadulterated anarcho-capitalism, before someone with power and money realizes that no rules means they get to make the rules, would be fucking sweet. =)
The enemies of Democracy are
Not all self-described libertarians agree or use the same arguments on every subject.
The Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell style libertarians oppose net neutrality because they oppose the government regulating the internet in any fashion. They view it as a slippery slope which will lead to many draconian regulations and eventual loss of many freedoms now enjoyed.
The Cato Institute, which is considered a libertarian think tank is often made fun of by the LRC and Paul supporters, usually for good reasons.
Libertarianism, like most isms have a large umbrella to hide under.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
"An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory."
I like libertarian philiosophy myself, but the nuts in the crowd can't understand that markets/politics is a synthesis of human psychology and behaviors perturbed by random events, and doesn't have some underlying grand unified theory like physics. Real life has, and always will be, a muddle.
While "Libertarian", in principle, comes down to a fairly tight set of notions about state noninterference, there are in practice a large number of ostensible "libertarians" that are pretty much strictly anti-regulation and pro-(specific)business, rather than libertarian as such.
Anyone who is against the activities of a group of volunteers, doing as they wish with the fruits of their labor, and offering goods under their chosen terms(Yes Virginia, the GPL is simply a voluntary private contract, not some conspiracy to oppress you) just because there isn't enough money and market-rhetoric involved is a damn shoddy libertarian. Of course, anyone who argues against the environmental regulations that prevent people from unilaterally poisoning my person and property is also a damn shoddy libertarian, and we have masses of those.
While certain flavors of market capitalism(and potentially even limited liability corporations) can be libertarian arrangements, anybody who mistakes supporting those for being a libertarian is, as they say, Doin' it Wrong.
The self-described libertarians who oppose free software and other radically egalitarian concepts aren't really libertarians in the sense of Ron Paul or the Libertarian Party. They're Capitalists or Plutocratics who simply want to be free of external restrictions on their ability to make money. But in our society's not-terribly-nuanced way of speaking about politics, anybody who is opposed to the State but isn't trying to replace it with the Church, gets labeled "libertarian".
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This just shows the utter hypocrisy of the libertarians. I've said all along that libertarians really want corporate feudalism, or at least they have been completely co-opted by corporate feudalists. Libertarians, in general, feel they are superior to everyone else. They also feel that it is a natural right for the elite to profit from the plebeians. When anything threatens their real agenda, they will set aside their supposed ideals to destroy it. Free software reduces the ability of the elite to profit off of the 'inferior people' of the world, and therefore it must be destroyed. Unions, even though they are a product of free association, also threaten libertarians ability to exploit others, and so you will never find a libertarian who is pro union, even though, according to their ideals, they should be.
The thing is, Libertarians always have such high levels of cognitive dissonance, they do not realize this is what they are doing. They firmly believe they are 'good' people, because being a 'good' person goes along with their image of themselves as vastly superior beings, so they will never look at all the ways their ideals and actions work to oppress the less fortunate. In their minds, they are helping the less fortunate by exploiting them.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
A simple test that I ask big-L Libertarians to engage in before I will discuss anything political with them on the internet:
Explain, in your own words, how the internet as it is presently could possibly have come to exist under a Libertarian political structure. In order to be taken seriously, Be sure to account for how we would have moved beyond the walled-garden networks of the late 80's early 90's, cite ARPAnet, and reference current backbone peering economics, including the recent maneuvering by Google which prompted the whole network neutrality debate in the first place.
Nobody's passed it yet.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
Actually, a lot of them focus on the freedoms of their imaginary future selves and on the vast fortunes they are surely going to amass. See Joe the Plumber. So they end up defending big corporations and rich people, even if those pollute and exploit. The free market rhetoric is just a facade to sound somewhat reasonable.
Libertarianism itself has valuable insights and should be taken seriously. It is spoiled by those who read Ayn Rand as teenagers and took up a professional career in corporate sponsored think tank libertarianism.
I would agree with the anti-net neutrality people if the network had been built without resorting to eminent domain and artificial monolopies.
You can't ask for special government favors to get your infrastructure built and then all of a sudden "come to libertarian Jesus" and demand to be free of government regulation.
The GPL requires copyright to be enforced. You can't place terms (such as releasing the source code) on distribution if distribution is already completely legal.
The GPL exists to fix a problem with Copyright law: If you release a work in the public domain, somebody can make a modified version, copyright THAT, and enforce it against YOU. They can also create a compilation of a number of public domain works and copyright the compilation.
This means, for instance, that some commercial entity could fix a bug in or add a feature to your public-domain software product and you couldn't make the equivalent fix or add the equivalent feature. Or they could construct a distribution (ala Red Had or Debian) and copyright it, and no equivalent could be made - first Linux distribution gets a monopoly on Linux distributions.
GPL and most other FOSS licenses head this off by maintaining the copyright and using the licensing terms on the underlying work to deny adding such restrictions to derived works and compilations.
But without copyright the restrictions couldn't be added. Sure, something like the GPL would be unenforceable. But if someone were to release a bug fix or upgrade, anyone could reverse-engineer it and include the fix/upgrade in another version of the public-domain work. If someone made a compilation, anyone else could make a similar or identical compilation. Or they could just copy the fixed/upgraded version or compilation. So the GPL's purpose - allowing software set free to STAY free - would be realized and the GPL would be unnecessary.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I don't see why libertarians object to this?
Most don't. The ones who do are either confused by the occasional Marxist-sounding rhetoric used by some free software advocates, or are actually corporate shills pretending to be libertarians. The Cato Institute has some excellent papers on the topic: they support free software in general, and oppose software patents and the DMCA because they stifle innovation and competition.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
It's telling that the first line of the Wiki is "Libertarianism is a term adopted by a broad spectrum of political philosophies". The first line of the second paragraph is "All forms of libertarianism support strong personal rights to life and liberty, but do not agree on the subject of property".
So how can we have a discussion which is fundamentally about questioning the libertarian stance on property when there isn't one?
To me libertarianism derives from liberty and hence the fundamental rule is everybody should be free to do as they please, provided that does not encroach on the equal rights of others, at which point a fair and just balance must be struck. (If you "get it" you'll realise everything past the first comma is redundant.) For what it's worth I certainly do not agree with the elimination of the state because a) the state (or at least judiciary) is necessary to arbitrate and enforce "a fair and just balance" b) there are major practical considerations such as markets not being perfect.
To relate to the OP, I have a suspicion my take fundamentally agrees to that of the author but the article loses itself in the detail while fundamentally the debate is about principle. Talk of a "bottom-up, participatory structure" and so on is not relevant. The question is, does free software impinge on the rights of others? My answer is of course not. It may be difficult for paid-software to compete, but nobody has a right to do well in the market place, they only have the right to try.
Try as you might, you'll never separate libertarianism from racism.
Even if a libertarian isn't personally racist, they see things like the civil rights act and the fair housing act (and the associated enforcement costs) as the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong, so at the very least a libertarian world view enables racism.
I probably even agree with you that regulation is needed to avoid large boom and bust cycles at the cost of overall efficiency.
Before the Fed there were no "large" boom and bust cycles, there were much smaller "corrections" of the market. The Fed then started attempting to fix "corrections" which would allow the market to over inflate and then burst causing a larger correction than would naturally occur. The large boom bust cycles are a byproduct of market manipulation by the Fed.
I'm not in the abolish the fed camp or in the gold standard camp, but having the Fed maintain a fixed interest rate and a fixed money supply (i.e. no printing extra money) regardless of emergencies in the market would do wonders for the economy.
How about the black market and drugs? A "Free" market in the drug trade becomes rapidly overcome by an oligarchy of competing organized criminal interests who, when not taking on each other, will do their best to prevent or co-op upstarts in the name of reducing competition.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.
And to ensure the "-1 Flamebait"...
Government is the Great Satan. All Evil comes from Government, and all Good from the Market, according to the Ayatollah Rand.
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton