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Cybercommunism and the Gift Culture
A number of readers alerted us to the latest Andrew Leonard piece over at Salon. He's covering the latest Richard Barbrook book "Cybercommunism". One of the salient points of Barbrook's latest arguement is that all of this free-software/open-source is "superseding capitalism". For those who remember, Barbrook was the author of The California Ideology, a 1996 screed.
I think Richard Stallman said it best: Carl Marx didn't invent helping your neighbor.
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
Let's see... exactly how does the popularity of free and open source software equate to mass ownership and control of the means of production?
What are the means of production in this case? The programming languages? The compilers? The hardware? The knowledge and experience of programmers, documentation writers, designers, and software engineers? A $20/month Internet connection? MAE-East? Cisco?
If he'd framed his thoughts in the "Intellectual Property vs. Human Achievement" debate, perhaps he'd have some modicum of a point.
Otherwise, you're stuck on the slippery slope that says that derivation and trigonometry tables are communism, self-help books are communism, do-it-yourself videos are communism....
I think the moral of this story is: Just because you aren't getting paid or receiving other benefits from open source/free software doesn't mean that no one else is -- or that everyone else would turn it down out of political or economic principles.
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Open Source is about Freedom and capitalism is not. So Open Source is anti-capitalist.
l
And I like to think that it is a lot anarchistic (in the sense of lack of power and lack of authority, not chaos), mainly because of it's principles of liberty, equality and solidarity. ). It is not communism because communism is autoritharian, and Open Source projects seens to be very descentralized (except for Linux where Linus Torvalds seens to be a mini-dictator). Everyone can participate, everything is free and people work on it for joy and solidarity.
Sorry but I don't speak english very well, I would talk about it a lot better in my own language (Portuguese).
I would like to note that thery is a very very very interesting article about this topic on this site, please read it even if you do not agree with anarchism or open source, it is worthy: http://old.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.htm
And for more reference about anarchism, you can get the package "anarchism" in the debian distro, or read a online faq at: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/
-- You are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike.
Not to rain on parades here, but freedom of information is nearly an ideal of communism. Albeit a roundabout way, no one really "owns" information if it is in the general public. Communism (True communism I should say) does not allow anyone to own property, thus the root word commune, or communal.
Take this a step further and if we (at least our govt.) says people can own ideas (IP Law...) then in a communistic sense, no one can claim ownership of ideas, thus if ideas are in the general public, they are free.
The problem with Americans (in general, cause I am an American and I have learned what communism is about) is that they look at the great socialist experiment that took place in the former Soviet Union (United Soviet Socialist Republic, anyone see that???) and mislabel it since generally Lenin was a Communist reformer. Unfortunately, Stalin wasn't, and we all see where that led Trotsky (a red fellow of Lenin's).
Now, furthermore, I have never found a communist dictator in history.
To share my own opinion about the article, personally I have to agree with the previously stated post that this community works more in the nepotistic sense (check that previous post for full details). We take in those who can, pardon the expression, hack it and generally exclude those who choose not to. How many articles have we read where the focus is usability, not cool gizmos, being the key to domination? How many "But can my mom use it...?" articles?
The sheer truth is that even though we may pride ourselves (and why Barbrook picks up the term???) as a gift community, we actually work to comprise strict division lines like "Oh, you use Windows..." and look down upon them. My fellow CS majors think I'm crazy (since our school is primarily on an NT network) cause I don't have a single box that does windows. They even dual boot. So obviously, there is some line that is drawn between us, even though I don't recall being an OS bigot and putting it there.
So, in all honesty, it's a big in-joke. We get it, people like Barbrook try to get it (and sometimes Katz can fall in that category), and then there's the people who don't even try. They don't care.
Plain and simple, it's not communist because the community is not truly inclusive of the whole population, not even the whole population of computer users.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
The ironic thing about that piece I thought was that he was describing the hacker "gift culture" at the same time his own paper is limited to "non-commerical" use only. In other words, it's not DFSG compliant!
I don't agree that the hacker culture is a "communist" one. Voluntary associations and donations are very much a feature of such anti-communist systems as anarcho-capitalism as well as anarchy/communism. However, I did love the way he compared the current proprietary software industry to Stalinism.
Did I get enough -ism's in there?
I know this is going to kill my karma, but I'm past caring.
How can someone who uses the words "salient" and "screed" ALSO misspell "argument" and "supercede"?
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M. Barbrook appears to be a critic of the sort who makes money by selling to lit-crit fans material which would, if posted to Slashdot or USENET, be dismissed as flamage, trolling, or miscellaneous nonsense.
For another example of his postmodern "brilliance", see this Brain Tennis debate between him and Aaron Lynch (also not my favorite guy) on the subject of memetics.
I don't think so. Free sofware is about freedom. Many companies make a good bit of money off of free software in a totally democractic way. Free Software just makes sure that others have the freedom to do what they want with it. It is also the freedom of information that is sought by free software. If it wasn't for open source software, what would young computer scientists look to for real world examples. Freedom of information and freedom to customize what you own doesn't sound like a communistic ideal. In fact, the last I checked, freedom of information was something communism tried to suffocate. Plus, it is voluntary. When was the last time a communist dictator politely asked the people if he could volunteer to run their lives?
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Boy, one would think this guy knew his Marx and Lenin better...
AFAIK, Communism is rooted in the idea that the working man would rise up and overthrow the ruling class, distributing the fruits of labor equally to fellow proletariat. This man thinks the free software culture is communism?
Bah! Humbug!
The Internet is STILL a tiny club of culturally-elite, rich (compared to the rest of the world) burgoise representing everything despised by Marx. Despite our burgeoning population, we represent a tiny fraction of priveleged humanity trodding upon the backs of the repressed masses. We distribute our gifts to other members of this elite class of intellectuals.
The Free Software culture is far from Communism. It more resembles Nepotism, with the talented, rich few giving away to the less-talented rich few -- yet all members of the same, elite club. Maybe if we could bring the Internet to the huddled masses with no concept of computers...
But we can't even feed most of them.
I must agree with the comments noted in the review from others: The idea that the "gift culture" is communism is hogwash.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
profit, the foundation of capitalism
Just a little nitpick, but property is the foundation of capitalism. "Profit" exists in any arrangement where some investment of resources yields more value than the resources in their previous state.
Regarding intellectual property, "open source" software is very communistic, in that it distributes ownership to the community (or removes ownership altogether, which is the same thing if the community includes everybody).
It drives me absolutely friggin' nuts when I see people say things like "It's not communist; it's democratic" and vice versa.
Communism is an *economic* system, like capitalism. Democracy is a political system, like totalitarianism.
That said, I have problems with any comparison of a "gift culture" to communism. One of the basic tenets of communicsm is "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." It's a two-way street, and a gift, by definition, is a one-way deal. Nobody is making sure that writers of open-source software are given *anything* in return, and that's where any comparison to communism will fall apart.
You mean it doesn't work in a world based on scarcity. In cyberspace scarcity does not exist, it costs nothing for me to share ideas or software, therefore communism can work, just not in the "real world".
If hackers were truly communist, they would choose to write programs "for the greater good". Instead, most tend to write programs they are interested in. In this, open source programming is no less a selfish activity then programming for a "capitalist" boss. The only difference is that in one the coin of the realm is cool software while in the other it is cash.
People work with systems like Linux because for most of them, this is the easiest they can work on on the sorts of projects they want to work on. If they love what they do, this, in and of itself, is the motivating factor. Money doesn't enter into it.
The giving away of the software afterwords is a sort of global deal that allows hackers to work on such projects. No single hacker could build an OS. A bunch of them together can. If your goal is to build an OS, and you don't have a job at Microsoft, pretty much the only way is to share code with your buddies.
That's what drives open source, not altruism. And in that, it is as fully "greed" oriented as capitalism. Which is, of course, why it works while communist systems, relying on altruism, mostly fail.
In software there is no cost to the owner to give it away. People like the above author don't understand this and thus confuse it for communism.
The cake is a pie
They are not forced, participation is entirely voluntary, and the original author maintains ownership of that property, to do with as they please. Sounds an awful lot like capitalism to me.
I don't think you quite grasp that the idea that "property" denies others control over some resource, it does not enable the owner to do what they will with it. Your ability to use property is obvious and implicit. By the same token, I can steal your property and do whatever I want with it, too. That doesn't mean I own it.
By giving code away [1], you have removed control over that property. Sure, you can do whatever you want with it, but so can everyone else. Nobody owns it, because its infinitely reproducable. It isn't really property any longer.
And what's with this "non-forced, voluntary participation" == capitalism stuff? Tell that to sweatshop workers with no education. I'm sure they'd love to tell you about their freedom.
[1] Yes, I know there are usually license restrictions. They exist to prevent exploitment. I think most of us would agree the ideal license is no license (public domain, or BSD and its like)
Yes, I concur. Statist communism is bad. Libertarian socialism (anarchism) is good. It advocates decentralized decision making and puts freedom at the forefront of its agenda. Futhermore, individualist anarchism revolve around *free market* principles, but with workers selling their own "fruits of labor", insteal of corporation profiting from them.
If you look at the most modern management theory on worker empowerment, decentralised decision making, team building and the such, it bases itself on one common theme - The people who meet the customers and actually do the grunt work are the peopole who are most qualified and knowledgable about their work. In essence, type Y/Z management theory which trust people to actually like to work has many similarities to anarchist ideals.
This contrasts to the original capitalist assumptions that people are in fact lazy and the only motivational factor for them to work is monetary profit (ie. greed). This assumption has turned many of the world's larget companies into bloated bureaucracies such as GM (with it's 15 levels of management to supervise everyone and managment knowing jack about making cars haha). Look what cars GM made in the 80's and you will understand why capitalism, as it was originally intended, has failed.
Capitalism in its truest form exploits both employees and customers for profit. However, we do not live in a strictly capitalist world. We are heavily influenced by capitalism, and for proof, look at how the world is obsessed with intellectual property. Intellectual property is the natural way of extending capitalist control to ideas, literature, music, movies and software.
However, does capitalist property controls belong in the realms of ideas and intellectual (as opposed to physical) works. The argument GNU makes is *no*; property should be physical; ideas should be free (as in speech).
That is the reason why RMS stands so firmly on the issue why FS should not be called OSS. The political and ideological implications for free software is that is ensures the ultimate preservation for freedom of ideas; not just resulting in better software, but a better system for the world.
Futhermore, capitalism and free-market are not synonyms. They should not be used as such. It is possible to have a free-market without predominant capitalist ideals. However, many business and political elites would like us to think otherwise.
Free software, on the other hand, is one step in the right direction. It is relieving monopoly control over the intellectual ideas that they should never of had control over in the first place. They do no behave like physical property and they should not be treated as such.
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Here are the relevant definitions from Merriam-Webster:
Emphasis mine. I've only snipped irrelevent definitions.
So, in short, there are a few aspects of Communism which the Free Software movement shares. But by and large, we're the diametric opposite of Communists: we hate central authority and control, we like owning our own computers and choosing which OSes we run, and we don't like serving other people. We serve ourselves. We code for ourselves.
In stark contrast:
I think that describes us pretty well. It's the definition of Libertarian.
Do you think it's just a coincidence that the Hat is Red?
Seriously though, before KM cooked up Communism, he invented Dialectical Materialism, which analyzes systems in the context of their transitions. Capitalism will bring about its own downfall because it is a stage in the evolution of our social system, just like feudalism, monarchy, and state capitalism (aka Communism).
While it should be obvious that Capitalism will have to evolve into (or be replaced by) something else, the nonobvious parts are how and when. KM had no idea that the computer was coming along. He understood what happens when human labor can be abstracted into a machine, but what happens when the machine is abstracted into software?
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The ideas of capitalism and communism are rooted in the problem of how to best divvy up scarce resources
Well, no. The idea of capitalism is basically economic freedom -- anyone (whether noble born or the child of a serf) can run a business with the same rights as all the other people. The idea of communism is public ownership of means of production.
There's only so much food, land, oil, etc. to go around. If I have a barrel of oil and I give it away, I've lost something (the use of the oil).
You're describing classic economics which assume scarcity of resources. This approach is applicable to all societies, not only capitalist and communist ones.
Software works in the opposite way. If I give away a piece of software I write and other people use it, I haven't lost anything (I can still use the software myself)
Again, no. This is a standard argument, but it doesn't work because people forget about opportunity cost. Say, today evening I can go to a movie or to a restaurant (but not both). If I go to a movie, not eating out is my opportunity cost of going to the movies. In the same way, if you give your software away, you incur the opportunity cost because you could have sold it, but didn't. And if you couldn't have sold it, one starts to wonder about the value of this software...
In other words, giving away my software is the greedy thing to do.
Tell it to Bill Gates. He must be gnashing his teeth now, thinking about how he missed his chance.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
It's 1999, and some of us are STILL trying to use the term "Communism" as some sort of epiphet.
Bah, I say! My parents were driven out of Cuba because Fidel Castro, a self-styled Communist, managed to take power. You won't find a more anti-communist environment than South Florida (were many of the older generation still refer to themselves as "in exile"). Whether what goes on in Cuba would be what Marx called Communism is another matter.I spent the first 27 years of my life hearing about the evils of Communism, and seeing its effects on those who made it here. I certainly am no friend of Communism as it has been implemented in the real world. You'd think I'd automatically end up a foaming-at-the-mouth anti-communist. Guess what...
Let's get this straight once and for all: Communism is a political ideology. It is NOT synonymous with "evil" or "baby killer" or whatever the hell else people want to label it as so as to better hitch their ideological little red wagons to.
You disagree with someone's politics? Fine. Just don't be so lazy as to throw the term "communism" around as a substitute for rational thought. The only "Evil Empire" we face today is Darth Vader's. Rational people of good conscience should be able to discuss politics (even as heretical a concept as "capitalism has flaws") in a civilized manner. We shouldn't settle for less.
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
Does this article not remind you of the gadfly ivory tower pinhead debate scene in _Cryptonomicon_?
Communism is no more applicable to Internet culture of free information than capitalism is. Both of those socio-economic models are outdated crap based on Malthus' original fallacy of scarcity - the idea that there is only so much stuff to go around, so we must all fight each other for our share. Rather than looting the threadbare intellectual corpses of Karl Marx and Adam Smith, they should try reading something *relevant*, like R. Buckminster Fuller's _The Critical Path_.
Ivory tower leftists declaring victory on the 'net is as irrelevant and silly as Wall Street capitalists declaring victory. Neither side won - WE won. They just don't know it yet.
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> (the use of the oil). Therefore there has to be some system for
> determining who gets what.
Precisely.
Marx: "To each according to his need, from each according to his ability."
Marx lived in an age in which all economics were based on the economics of scarcity. The second half of the little equation implied the use of force.
In a Gift Culture economy, the second half ceases to be an issue; from each according to his whim might be more like it. Given a sufficiently useful thing - say, a SCSI driver - there's bound to be someone willing to get off his duff and code it up, and from that point on, the advantages of OSS which we all know and love, take over. It's in the developer's best interest to see that the code is distributed widely. At that point, anyone who happens to need a SCSI driver can simply download it.
But to call this "communism" - when it requires economic products (software) that were not only nonexistent, but inconceivable within the socioeconomic framework in which communism was invented - smacks of intellectual dishonesty of the highest order.
We'll take it as axiomatic that communism is coercive and bad under the economics of scarcity - you have to coerce people who don't buy into the system to "give" up their material posessions, or you have to coerce them into buying into the system. Whether you deprive them of their stuff or try to reprogram their minds, it's coercive, and leads to the disasters we've seen in the 20th century whenever an attempt is made to implement it on a large scale.
So much for superseding capitalism in any economic activity involving atoms instead of bits. Been there, done that, it didn't work. So let's try it with software:
Under "cyber-communism" - who writes the code for the payroll systems? The point-of-sale terminals? The inventory software for McDonalds? All the other "boring" stuff that isn't "fun"? Or does "from each according to his ability" simply mean that instead of taking your grain or your barrels of oil, the Central Committee will simply take your time and force you to work on some mind-numbingly dull project becase, after all, you're able to code payroll?
So much for superseding capitalism for all the grunt work.
What's left is what we already know to be true - for certain types of software...
> giving away my software is the greedy thing to do.
> Schemes intended to facilitate distribution of other kinds of wealth just aren't needed.
Back to the cybercommunism article, however - exactly how this very limited subset of economic activity (i.e. the development of cool software of broad-based application) can "supersede capitalism" is utterly beyond me. Furthermore, what this has to do with communism - a philosophical system invented in an age where a Gift Culture was inconceivable - is equally beyond me. But saying that "Giving cool and useful software away is fun" doesn't quite sell as many books as using buzzword-compliant postmodernisms such as "cybercommunism" or the "California Ideology", does it?
I concur with Ami. The arguments offered by the author just don't compute.
Does Barbrook have a problem with public libraries? After all, they subvert capitalism by letting people read books without buying them.
Giving away the secrets of math used to be a crime punishable by death (think of the Pythagoreans). Good thing all we have to worry about is capitalism.
I think he's wrong is using the term Cybercommunism because it isn't communist. Communism is based on a more equitable distribution of wealth and power run by a centralized power who knows what's best for the masses. The Open Source movement is much more Anarcho-Syndicalist because it is a decentralized movement that rewards both giving to the community and individual effort and work. Both Communism and Capitalism are very hierarchical systems where those people on the top decided what's best for most other people. Libertarianism get's it partially right because they attack that hierarchy but they don't replace it with an egalitarian community oriented society. Like Libertarianism pure Anarchism is very similar with roots in the left rather than the right. Anarcho-Syndicalism is a combination of egalitarian community oriented values of communism and the decentralized anti-hierarchical ideas of Libertarianism.
:)
My point is that in the Open Source community people are working as a collective contributing individual effort for a common goal without being told by a higher authority what to do and exactly how to do it. It's easier to look at the Open Source community as it compares to simple dichotomies of cold war politics but isn't accurate. It's better market speak to say cybercommunism than cyber-neo-anarcho-syndicalist.
FYI: Anarcho-Syndicalism was a major movement in northern Spain during the 1930's, and fought with other leftist such as the Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats against the Fascists lead by Franco. The Fascists won and they were pretty much all killed or driven in to exile.
The power of technology is manifest in how it is applied within the social matrix.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to take issue with this. An information "gift economy" does not supersede capitalism; that's ridiculous.
:) profit is among his motivations. Fine, that's the way the world works.
Look at it: An information gift economy (the focus of the Salon piece) essentially allows information to be free (as in speech, not beer, according to the hallowed cliche). Does that mean that the info has no value? No, it means that information's value increases as it spreads. Essentially, it's the distribution of information that becomes important. Linuxcare and RedHat are good examples of this. Linuxcare offers support services, right? The information they provide is essentially already available if you know where to look and how to interpret it. But by providing it in a different format to people who don't know where to look or how to interpret the information themselves, there is value. And I daresay that the founders of Linuxcare were motivated (at least in part) by profit, the foundation of capitalism. RedHat is perhaps a better example, since they freely give away the OS via the Net, and allow you to redistribute copies of what you do buy. Again, the value comes from providing support information and services.
To take it a step further, yes, I can find all the information I want about, say, firewals on the Net. But I still own the O'Reilly book Building Internet Firewalls because there is so much information condensed that having it in book format is valuable. And as Tim O'Reilly has pointed out recently
Taking a look away from the information economy (which is still far smaller than the rest of the economy), capitalism is in no real danger. Think GM's going to start giving away cars and trucks to just anybody? How about DeBeers opening up that warehouse?
C'mon folks, let's not get carried away. Information should be free, but that doesn't mean that people aren't going to try to get ahead in life. That's the profit motive, and that's human nature.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
Communism is simple, perfect, and not doable in the real world. The theory is great, but people's greed never allows it to work. It will work for awhile, and then crumble. (Cross reference USSR, communes, etc.) But in software, where it costs noone any money to duplicate software, it can work. But people don't want to call GNU, *BSD, Linux, etc "Software Communism," because of the connotations of the word "communism." But think: It is the efforts of all going to help all, ie, Alan Cox makes a SCSI driver. Now every one has access to that SCSI driver; it has gone into the collective pool. Now in physical communism, the pool grows and shrinks, depending on how many people add work, food, money, etc, and how many people take these things out. But in software, the pool can only grow. So when I download a SCSI driver, it doesn't prevent anyone else from downloading the same driver.
http://www.bombcar.com It's where it is at.
Fellowship 9/11
Many people admit that Communism is dead, but they often say they'd like it if it weren't tied to that totalitarian government it always seems bundled with.
But Communism can't come without that totalitarian government, much as Exploder can't come without Windows. The system does not work without a state to enforce it (much as Exploder wouldn't own the browser market if it weren't bundled with Windows; pardon the stretched analogy).
Communism requires people to work for the good of each other, not for themselves. Capitalism requires people to work for themselves to survive. This is the simple, straightforward difference between the two systems, but many people have a hard time grasping it.
Would you trust other people to harvest the raw materials that'll put food on your table? Or would you rather do it yourself?
Most people, including myself, answer "Give me the plowshare!" to the above. Once I'm done feeding myself, I've got no problem helping my neighbor harvest his crop, but only after I've got a full stomach. So, in Communist nations, the Government sticks a gun to your back while you harvest your neighbor's crop.
Linux wasn't created like this. People wrote software for themselves - whether they were just creating utilities for their own use, or they got a "natural high" from helping other people, they had their own interests at heart. And they hate central authority.
We're anarcho-libertarians. The exact opposite of Communists.
Free Software is not Communism as it stands now, but the idea that a person who has not earned it has a "right" to software written by somebody else is espoused by Richard Stallman, and is communistic. His GNU philosophy page suggests that the GPL is only a compromise, an interim solution, so that his system can be realized in part while copyright law is still in force. But his ultimate aim, he explains, is to eliminate copyright law altogether. The world that would be created by such a change presents quite a different picture from the way things are now.
As the GPL is now, people are asked to place their programs under it voluntarily. Some people can afford to, and they like to show off their programs, so they do. As long as that voluntary spirit continues, no one's rights are violated -- not those of authors, not those of users, not even those of businesses, who have no right to stop competition of any kind (and if they have any confidence in their own abilities, they don't ask for any). It's all rather benevolent, in fact; competition is in the spirit of play.
But when Richard Stallman says that copyright law should be eliminated, he's saying that programmers should not have any choice about how to make money from their coding -- or, more accurately, that they should have only one: "write Free code, or do not write at all." Some people could code anyway, the same way they do now, but there would be a difference: their choice to do so would now be meaningless.
Also, all the most popular non-free software would vanish, and John Carmack would be out of a job... and any job he could get would pay much less. By what right do people ask this of him -- but worse, by what right do they dare take it without asking?
If copyright is eliminated, what becomes of the rights of people who create software in the first place? Suddenly anybody who sees code can copy it. So coders have to code in secret, so nobody steals their work in progress; they have to make it arcane, so they can charge for teaching about it; they have to find rich sponsors who are willing to pay all in advance, lest someone steal their work in progress, complete it, and present it for the same payment before they do... and how rich will these patrons be, considering that much of the riches of this century were made selling proprietary software! Thus, software publishers and their writers are "sacrificed for the public good."
Remember, the communists sought to establish "freedom," too, in their own way, by sacrificing certain other individual rights in the name of the public good. But the public good cannot be achieved through sacrificing some people to others. There is no right to take the fruits of someone else's labor. It is beside the point whether those "fruits" really are fruits, or durable goods, or intellectual goods (which are the most durable of all). You have to have the owners' consent to use his property. If other people don't need your consent to take the fruits of your labor -- then you're their slave. And the idea of a "right to enslave" makes a mockery of the idea of natural, equal, inalienable rights.
As things are now, no one has any right to stop you from giving away the software that you wrote, based on your own ideas. Because of that, Open Source software is here to stay, and it will always present powerful competition for any would-be monopolists who want to set arbitrarily high prices and restrictions. (Just like anybody else who offers lower prices and fewer restrictions.) However, no one has any right to force you to give your work away, either. And that is the way it should stay!
If you want to sell licenses for money, and you think you can beat the risk of Free Software writing a clone (which actually isn't too hard, considering how many commercial programs there are that still haven't been cloned), go ahead. When that right dies, the real Free Software that everybody knows and loves dies with it.
-- An Ayn-onymous Coward
Neither of them fit very well to describe what is happening in the free software world. It's sharing, and voluntary, so it's really its own thing.
It's not even really anarchist, as there is a legal structure (copyright) that enforces what you can and cannot do with source code.
Sort of libertarian or communitarian, maybe. The important point is that it's voluntary, at the individual level.
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The ideas of capitalism and communism are rooted in the problem of how to best divvy up scarce resources. There's only so much food, land, oil, etc. to go around. If I have a barrel of oil and I give it away, I've lost something (the use of the oil). Therefore there has to be some system for determining who gets what.
Software works in the opposite way. If I give away a piece of software I write and other people use it, I haven't lost anything (I can still use the software myself). In fact, the software I have actually becomes more valuable if more people use it: 1/I'll be able to exchange files with other people (this is why MS Office is so 'valuable'), 2/I'll get bug fixes and improvements from other people.
In other words, giving away my software is the greedy thing to do. Schemes intended to facilitate distribution of other kinds of wealth just aren't needed.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I think we miss a big point in these arguments when we compare the *ideal* of communism to the reality. Most dicussions involving communism that I get into end up along the lines of,
a) "Communism is evil, cf: Russia, Stalin, Cuba"
b) "Communism is impossible, cf: The Former USSR, Cuba, China, human nature."
c) "Communism is unnatural, like sodomy and oral sex" (this one I won't even go into...)
But hold on - aren't all these examples the result of an abuse of power? What people are referring to in these cases is not a failure of the ideal of communism, but a failure of the implementation of it - one reason why I think Marxism leaves a lot to be desired. You can't change people's philosophy by kicking them in the pants.
I'm not fond of the idea that capitalism *is* "human nature", and I'm sure many of you share that opinion - which is why I think the OSS movement has such wonderful anti-capitalist propensities.
If you don't share that opinion, and believe capitalism is the be-all and end-all of human freedom (and that OSS is simply an extension of that freedom), think carefully:
Under capitalism, how can the freedoms of the community be reconciled by the overpowering freedom of the individual? Can they?
I wager not.
I completely agree that Marx and communism have nothing to do with "gift culture" and open source in general. However...
The Internet is STILL a tiny club of culturally-elite, rich (compared to the rest of the world) burgoise representing everything despised by Marx
That's not true. Culturally elite, maybe (although Marx didn't care much about that), bourgeois -- no. What is bourgeoisie, at least in Marx's times? They are the people who own the means of production and thus do not work, but rather live on the profits from their property. I doubt very much that the majority, hell, even 10%, of the Internet population fits this description. A programmer, and an IT worker in general, is often quite close to the idea of proletariat (cf. Dilbert) -- the fact that he works with this brain rather than his muscles doesn't change much.
we represent a tiny fraction of priveleged humanity trodding upon the backs of the repressed masses
Priviledged humanity, yes (although that still doesn't make us bourgeoisie), but what are those repressed masses? Especially in the rapidly gaining information economy? Hey, aren't they those programmers in the cubicles around, hunched over their keyboard, working overtime, rarely seeing the light of day...
Of course you may be talking about the North vs. South split, but then it's hard to make an argument that the West gets its wealth by robbing the poor masses of the Third World.
We distribute our gifts to other members of this elite class of intellectuals
I guess it must be nice to feel oneself a member of the elite class of intellectuals. Unfortunately, I don't think Internet fills the bill. First, intellectual elite tends to mass in arts, literature, humanities, and not around such technical things as computers. Second, go to AOL and look around. 3leet, aren't they?
It more resembles Nepotism, with the talented, rich few giving away to the less-talented rich few -- yet all members of the same, elite club
Nepotism is actually giving out perks (like highly paid do-nothing jobs in a bureacracy) to relatives. It has nothing to do with elite clubs or gift culture. And no, I don't think that the free software culture resembles an elite club. Anyone can join -- the economic price of entry is quite low (in the West, at least). There is an intellectual price of entry which is significant -- it takes good brains in order to play -- but that is something that Marx and others cannot help with...
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
It might be useful here to point out that "Communism" is not the same as the former Eastern Bloc/Soviet totalitarian states. In several posts people are talking about dictators and freedom of information, but the repression in the former "Communist" countries has nothing to do with the idea of Communism.
Communism was an idea, a way of organizing economies, the countries refered to claimed to be attempting to implement this idea, but most didn't even claim to have met that ideal and refered to themselves as "Socialist". It also must be pointed out that many countries that profess to be capitalist also are just as repressive as the communist ones were.
Marx had a lot of economic theories about the future of the relationship between the people who do the wrok and the people who own the resources and the means of production, and postulated a better system that could be implemented once the former group had finaly cast off the chains imposed on them the latter.
Communism could be summed up by the phrase "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". It has nothing to do with freedom or the lack of freedom according to any of the definitions often used on this board (speech, beer civil)
If you read some of the libertarian and anarchist content on the net you should know that there are 2 forms of socialism: -statist socialism-government uses coercion to get people to work together -libertarian socialism-groups of people work together peacefully to make society better, almost no government here. I could be wrong, but I would bet that most OSS developers are libertarian, not statist socialists. Let's face it, CSS (closed source) will never die.... but it won't have the facist style grip it has economy now in the future. Loop at apple, OSS'ing OS X! They are capitalists people, not communists. As far as the GPL goes, it is only 1 part of the OSS movement, the most radical one. Allowing the proponents of GPL only OSS to define OSS would be like allowing puritans to define christianity.
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