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ESR Responds to Nikolai Bezroukov
Cycon writes "ESR has posted his response to Nikolai Bezroukov's criticism of The Cathedral and the Bazaar posted earlier today. ESR states that he 'welcomes such criticism' but that Nikolai 'adds almost nothing useful to the debate.'"
So, some socialists / governments composed of socialists have committed evil acts (eg mass murder) therefore socialists are evil. That's an accurate statement of your argument?
Presumably you would accept then that since some capitalists / governments composed of capitalists have committed evil acts (eg mass murder) therefore capitalists are evil?
Or more importantly, since some people / governments composed of people have committed evil acts (eg mass murder) therefore people are evil?
Or do you just generalise those sorts of actions to socialists out of a desire to be aburd?
In a nutshell, it is a philosophy that believes in the freedom of the individual before all else.
If you understood this, then you would understand that ESR isn't just attacking Stalinist Marxism - he's attacking pure, ideal Marxism as well. The marxist (socialist) approach is to have government control everything to make sure that everyone gets their fair share.
This is in direct conflict with a Libertarian's ideals and goals, and would therefore be viewed as evil.
99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again...
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
So from what you say it seems you agree that the KDE contributors at least are generous. Other open source contributors show their generosity in just the same way, by giving of their time and skills to make a product that is open to everyone.
At any given time when a political philosophy is brought into the spectrum of development of anything, it no longer becomes a property of it's creator. Nor, does it reflect any of it's true intent. Political philosophy is eating up valuable time that people could be doing other things with. ESR success was well covered with CatB. But he no longer has anything to lean on. He wrote CatB based on an observation of two ideas: market model and Linux. The pivoting point which he stands on, should not be used over and over again to a deterministic point for anyone or any group. It's an opinion, if you have two many people believing in one opinion it becomes fact. CatB does not and will not ever oversee the development of facts. It's based on philosophy and politics. Both of which are an argument of semantics.
* buy beef from the US?
Every country has trade barriers. See recent nafta disputes as well as trade embargoes against cuba. It's a fact of life when trying to balance domestic and foreign economies as well as keep support in particular industries.
* keep a majority of what they earn?
I'm an american iving in Canada and having to pay almost 50% of what I earn is often complained about. However, Canadians view these social systems (such as health care) as a big part of their national identity. Yes, it's socialist, but I'm willing to give part of my income to benifit the majority (even if half of it is lost bureaucratically). If quality of life is maintained then I won't be mad.
* own a gun?
In half the western european countries I've visited, many people have guns. I, however, won't argue about the american mentality as per self protection though -- Human nature just presents itself differently under the strain of history and teachings.
etc etc,
As for the other comments, I don't know how to respond. I will however state that it is impossible for a country to please the majority, the individual, as well as the minority. Every decision the government makes is opposed by someone.
I completely agree with you on the point that ESR (if he really is an extreme libertarian) doesn't undertand government regulation. In a system where self interest is the main clause to adhere by, there must be well thought out moderation. Economic systems don't just work. They have the be babied with fiscal and monetary policies as well as with sometimes needed authority to keep a smooth business cycle.
There are just some industries where the leader fortifies the barriers to entry then abuses their power in having the consumer captive by jacking prices up and fighting off the occasional competitor who thinks they will muscle their way into the business. Is this behavior abberant? No. It's perfectly logical under our system. We just need some moderation to ensure subjective fairness takes place.
The story is the same with Oil company oligopolies. Even if they weren't colluding (and they are), an oligopoly by nature will try and keep prices high. If one of its members lowers prices, the rest will most likely follow -- however if one raises prices, the rest will most likely not. So they usually just keep prices static in hopes of keeping market share.
Now when they illegal collude (OPEC). The government must do all it can to combat them. It was incredibly smart of the government to keep a strategic reserve to prevent OPEC from holding the economy captive by arbitrarily raising prices. I don't see how some people think that government regulation doesn't have its place.
As for socialism, the subject is a little touchy. If you ask most people about this problem, they will say that they want to benifit without giving anything in return. Well you just can't do that. So when we accept that we have to give some to ensure some security, we then realize that the government is partially corrupt or is mismanaging that money to boost an immenent election campaign etc.. we say that socialist ideas are stupid. Unfortunately you can't really have it both ways. Human self interest just won't let it happen (no I'm not stating that it's bad -- just that it's a reality). I support countries with whichever mix of the two they pick. As long as the people are moderately happy.
----------
I wouldn't hold up Bill Clinton and the mainstream American national media as the guardians of freedom!
True. Clinton's a Republican in disguise -- he supports the "War on Drugs", for example -- and the mainstream media are the most obedient, slavish lapdogs the right wing has ever had in this country. It's disgusting.
Just one caveat:
Well, this is not so. The Communists and Nazis collaborated on several occasions -- the Berlin rent strike, for instance. The KPD's attitude to the Nazis fluctuated in accordance with the 3rd International line, as handed down from Moscow. Let's not make too many martyrs here, either. Some leaders certainly ended up in the camps; other, ironically enough, ended up in Stalin's camps; and others toed the party line to emerge as the leaders of the DDR.
It was the SPD, and only the SPD, who consistently opposed Hitler.
OK, make that two caveats! I don't think the Geramn economy was really turned around. Hitler's economic miracle was a short-term affair. It was based on unsustainable, non-productive expenditure (armaments), and could only be maintainted by plunder and conquest.
?????
Mitnick didn't deserve to spend five years in jail without trial. He deserved a trial, and from what I've seen, he should've been given time. I don't think how it worked out is how it did work out, but I've seen no reasoning to show that thinking Mitnick committed actions deserving jail time is fascist, or even wrong.
Sorry, do you mean that the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) isn't a kingdom(okay it's got a queen at the moment not a king but that's hardly a key issue) or that it's not united (a matter of degree I guess, but the intended meaning is pretty clear a number of countries united under a central monarchy and parliament, the existence of separarists (even violent ones) or of subsidiary parliaments hardly takes away from that)? It's difficult to seethe name as "ostentations", it's descriptive.
I disagree with ESR about a few major things - namely that open source development is inherently the best way to make good software (Go try BeOS! I am hereby throwing in my BeOS advocacy!)
But I can still respect Eric on the many things he has done right, and for his great ability as a writer. He is certainly far above most technical people in that regard, and he has done great things for open source both by writing code and pushing our ideas into the workplace.
And concerning this so-called "critique" of his work, I would say his response has properly nailed the critic on all counts. Nice job. I especially like the Edgar Allen Poe quote at the end.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Reading through the comments is mostly a thankless task, but what keeps me going is the chance to find the rare, well-stated insight that nourishes my curiosity and understanding.
Tonight, buried under yet another spasm of narcissism from ESR, and the rush to weigh in for or against him, rcade here has posed a penetrating question:
"How essential to the open exchange of knowledge is the notion that none of the participants are getting rich off the exchange?"
This deserves thinking about. Contributing to free software projects under the GPL is altruistic, yet it simultaneously serves one's pragmatic self-interest (not reinventing the wheel, etc.). So we find self-respecting Libertarians opposing it because they smell the altruism, and other self-respecting Libertarians praising it because they are free to just take whatever they need.
Resentment arises when we ignore contrary aspects of the situation, and instead try to defend an oversimplified, one-dimensional conception.
Thus the ironies. Free-marketeer Raymond writes "C & B" to explain our all-for-one, one-for-all operating system project to the capitalists (who don't get it), then gets testy when the socialistic aspect is pointed out. I think his essays have been valuable contributions, but I doubt that he would admit that they are classic propaganda and are intended to function as such.
This is why Bezroukov's use of the terms "vulgar Raymondism" and "vulgar Marxism" were guaranteed to get ESR's goat. Raymond and his groupies reacted predictably to the "Marxism" part, because their point-and-click political simplemindedness fails to understand that the term "vulgar Marxism" refers not to Marxism itself, but to ignorant charicatures of it. It is just such ignorant charicatures of free software that Raymond has worked to correct.
ESR's counterblast, and most of the comments, seek to divert us from the core of Bezroukov's essay, which is the analogy between free software development and academic scientific research.
Notice the different strategies: "C & B" sets up oversimplified, polarized extremes and advocates one against the other.
Bezroukov takes several aspects of the two phenomena and condsiders how they are alike and how they differ.
Propaganda vs. inquiry.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. -Albert Einstein
I am breathless with admiration. Fetchmail has revolutionized the industry. I mean, Thank God for ESR's fetchmail. Its not like there are alternatives... Eh? sendmail? Nah, no good, not done by ESR.
Disclaimer: I live in Europe, ol' Italy to be precise. I'll answer you point-by-point. I understand that you're only making examples, I'll try to show you that you're using the wrong examples.
1) Buy beef rom the US.
* I might be very wrong on this, but AFAIK US beef in Ol' Europe because of different regulations: US law allows *filling* your cattle with hormones to have them grow more heavy (mainly by retaining more water in their muscles and being fatter). Honestly, I wouldn't want to buy -much less eat- such a meat.
2) Genertically modified food
* In Italy there is some genetically modified food. It must be marked very prominently, thus allowing people not to buy it. I don't think I'd want to buy that kind of food either: the main reason why multinationals develop transgenic food is to tie some kind of producition to their products (be it fertilizers or bug killers or whatever). Multinationals don't bother controlling very long for possible side-effects of their modifications. On many papers I read the assumption that the current dramatic rise in allergies can also be traced to transgenic food. I don't have any title to prove or disprove this, but I tend to believe them.
3) Go to whatever doctor I please
* Of course I can. At any level. The worst that can happen is that I have to pay for the visit myself instead of having it paid by the Social Security system.
4) Keep a majority of what we earn
* You have a point here. In Europe taxes are claimed to me higher than in the US on average. But you must also consider that some expenses you US-citizens have to do have the form of taxes here. I'm thinking about Social Security here: I think that Health insurance takes quite a chunk of a person's earnings...
5) Own a gun
* I don't *WANT* to own a gun. And I don't want to go walking on the streets fearing that someone will go berserk on me (or on anyone else for that matter). Also notice that it's not forbidden to own guns here. It's just that there are quite a lot of checks done before you're allowed to carry one: this is a *very* weak point in the US law IMO - a leftover of the Wild Wild West times...
6) Transportations
* See the UK and their privatization of the railroad system - and some of the problems it lead to. It's a road most railroad agencies in Europe are following. And as far as local transportation is concerned, in Italy the main bus companies are owned by the Town Council ( I really don't know how to better express the concept, sorry), certainly not by the government.
7) Taking 'non-recognized' medicines
* I thought that there was a very tight control by the FDA (or whatever it is) over what kind of medicines are allowed in the US.
There are pros and cons to total deregulation here: if you have a really capable medic, then he might have an idea over what he's prescribing you. On the other side, if you aren't so lucky (or rich), you're practically selling your body to the pharmaceutical industry. Are you sure you wish to go down that way? Having an authority control what medicines are allowable dampens both these effects.
We're going offtopic here though.
The point I'm trying to make here is that extreme control (like the so-called "Real-world socialism" used to have and still has in some countries) is as bad as "no control at all".
I actually think that some european countries should be better studied by US regulators and students, as they sometimes can reach good compromises between these two extremes.
What does that prove? Can an american gain access to biological weapons if he wanted to? All of the restrictions you mentioned enjoy wide support from the people. I myself am not willing to eat GM food, ( and by the way, the only thing required is labelling for the most part of GM foods) In america, try finding out if the stuff you eat is genetically modified. The EU also passed some data protection laws that the US is trying to fight. If anything, the US is far more of a typically socialist country than any european state( Welfare, BIG defence budget, and enormous subsidies to farmers) Does the fact that anyone can buy guns make you feel safe? Part of the entire idea of civilisation is that you accept restrictions on your personal freedom. Try imagining a true libertarian society ... there is a reason it does not exist.
"These are just the examples that spring to mind without thinking about it very hard. As I said, the problem is that in principle, the power of the government is unlimited in a socialist society. The freedoms Europeans now enjoy could be obliterated in a very short time by a single capricious government. This is not a canard. It actually happened a little over 60 years ago, as you may recall." There are plenty of European governments existing under constitutions that limit their power. Some of these have socialist governments, and some don't. Some countries with governments with no constitutional limites on their powers have socialist governments and some dont. Limits on the power of government has nothing to do with socialism. Sovereign (i.e. wielding total power) monarchies, parliaments, etc long before socilism arose, there is no connection. Plenty of socialists strongly believe in limits the powers of their government along precisely the lines you describe. These are simply two unconnected issues.
"Here's the suede-denim secret police --
they have come for your un-cool niece!"
-- Jello Biafra
It's true though, my parents lived in CA back in the Sixties and they say it was a police state even then. It's gotten considerably worse since.
I think what the nice man means by "freedom" is that what he wants to do is legal. All the better if those who disgree with him are thrown in jail, eh? That's how we "protect our freedom" here in the US: By throwing millions of people in jail for no particular reason. Americans believe freedom to be a zero-sum game: If we arbitrarily imprison ten black kids, then there's ten more units of freedom to go around for the rest of us -- wooo-hooo! Yeah! Seriously, Americans really do believe in imprisoning people for very murky and voodooistic reasons. The more an American yells about freedom, the more proud he's likely to be about how we have more people in prison, per capita, than the Soviet Union ever did (and that's a fact).
"These are just the examples that spring to mind without thinking about it very hard. As I said, the problem is that in principle, the power of the government is unlimited in a socialist society. The freedoms Europeans now enjoy could be obliterated in a very short time by a single capricious government. This is not a canard. It actually happened a little over 60 years ago, as you may recall."
There are plenty of European governments existing under constitutions that limit their power. Some of these have socialist governments, and some don't. Some countries with governments with no constitutional limites on their powers have socialist governments and some dont.
Limits on the power of government has nothing to do with socialism. Sovereign (i.e. wielding total power) monarchies, parliaments, etc long before socilism arose, there is no connection.
Plenty of socialists strongly believe in limits the powers of their government along precisely the lines you describe. These are simply two unconnected issues.
WhoTF is 'LBT'??
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Still
Freaker / TuC
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Yes, forcing Raymond to surrender his property against his will for policies he does not support is by nature evil. It shows a complete lack of interest in the inherent rights of man.
Inherent how can a right be inherent are you some kind of religious freak or somthing? Rights are a construct of man, a consept. and they are not inherent to anything. rights were created by those who did not have them, to defend themselves, and others from tyrany. Giving, 10%, 20%, or even 70% of you're welth is not tyrany. it may not be the best thing, but is not tyrany.
Actually, Socialism has killed vastly more than 10.5 million. The entire ideology of socialism leads to both a loss of basic moral tenets and the loss of the sanctity of life. Millions ceased to exist because of the insane logic of idealistic revolutionaries.
Socialism never killed anyone. Stalin killed millions of people, pol-pot killed millions of people. but socialism was for them a tool, like Nazism (one 'I', btw) was a tool for hitler. a tool to gain power. Those men were evil, but the ideas were not. (The nazis were one of the most anti-commie people out there)
While Ideas can be evil, these are not. they may be bad ideas, or difficult to attain, but to say that they are evil is ludicrist.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Hi there,
:)
>Umm...okay, Europe doesn't have concentration camps but are citizens of most European countries allowed to:
>* buy beef from the US?
No, because cows from the US are treated with hormones that are outlawed here, since they have been proven to be harmful to people's health. I don't think thats a bad thing.
>* soon, buy genetically modified food?
You can allready buy genetically modified food here. However, there have been demands to have gentically modified food to be mandatorily labelled as such, so people who have moral objections to it can have the choice in using it.
>* go to whatever doctor they please?
Yes, i can do that. Any doctor, any hospital, alternative medicine etc.
>* keep a majority of what they earn?
Yes, tax rates are divided by wealth. If you're not extremely rich you keep the majority of what you earn. The maximum tax rate is something between 50 and 60% at the moment and will be brought down with the new tax plans to be issued in 2001 or so.
>* own a gun?
Nope. I don't need to since there is virtually nobody else with a gun. Professional criminals
have them ofcourse, but it's not them i'm afraid about. It's the agressive drunk next-door neighbour from across the street that would worry me, and luckily he's not able to get a gun in this country.
>* ride on a non-car transportation system (i.e. train, bus) that isn't owned or regulated to practical ownership by the gov't?
Yes, i can do that. Trains and busses have been privatized long ago. There is some regulation to make sure the companies don't abuse their strong positions they inherited from being a former state monopoly, but thats pretty much it.
>* many other things...
I can do those also i guess.
>* take a medicine whether or not the gov't health agency says they can?
Now hold on here. I wouldn't want to take a medicine that hasn't been approved by the government's health agency. Much too dangerous. So i don't see that as a bad thing. Medicines here are deviced in two cathegories, home-treatment and "real" medicines. The latter cathegory can only be aquired using a prescription from the doctor. This is done to counter medicine abuse and addiction.
I live in the Netherlands btw. The government here is a coalition between a socialist party and two liberal parties. Sure we have to pay more taxes, but in return we get a health system that offers the same level high-quality medical care for every citizen, regardless of wealth, a decent educational system with very good universities. To be admitted to a university you need brains, not money. Everybody has equal opportunity in getting a university degree here. To me that's more freedom, not less. That said, you can't really compare these two societies. The Netherlands has 16 million inhabitants and a tradition that goes back 1500 years. The Netherlands has been a republic since +/- 1590, ruled mostly by a council of provincial regents, being strongly in favour of a highly liberal capitalistic market. Eastern Germany and France for example have been much more rural in their economy, so they are bound to be more socialist in the traditional sense of the word. The history of these countries is VERY different, and their social and economical structure as a result is still very different, so it is dangerous to speak about "the European countries". There's a huge difference between eg. The Netherlands on one side and France, or even Belgium, on the other.
The problem is that some people involved in this debate seem to have heard that some European countries have either governments with no constitutional limits on their powers or else laws that they find objectionable (big surprise) and also that some European countries have socialist governments, and have concluded that the two go hand in hand. This is bizarre. These are separate issues. You can elect a socialist government in the USA (which will be limited by the constitution) and they can elect a thoroughly non-socialist government in the UK (which has no written constitution and no legal limitations on parliaments power). Do you understand? Separate issues.
The problem is that some people involved in this debate seem to have heard that some European countries have either governments with no constitutional limits on their powers or else laws that they find objectionable (big surprise) and also that some European countries have socialist governments, and have concluded that the two go hand in hand. This is bizarre.
These are separate issues. You can elect a socialist government in the USA (which will be limited by the constitution) and they can elect a thoroughly non-socialist government in the UK (which has no written constitution and no legal limitations on parliaments power). Do you understand? Separate issues.
by the way, the only thing required is labelling for the most part of GM foods) In america, try finding out if the stuff you eat is genetically modified.
Yes, that' sgovernment coercion the company has to label the food in europe but in America we are FREE not to have to have the label. its non of your bisiness what's in it' it's food they're a company if they sell it theyre successful company its be good because if they sell bad food they go out of business.
The EU also passed some data protection laws that the US is trying to fight.
Again you are confused the data belongs to company that has it if they cant sell it to anybody or if the government make them not be able to get it THATS SOCIALISM AND ITS WRONG. Its bad for freedom and thats wrong. If you want the privacy law you haev something to hide. Your free in the US but freedom should not be confused with license, freedom doesnt mean you can just go and do anything. It means yuor free. Thats not the same thing as being able to do anything just because you want to. If you are that excited about privacy you must have somethign to hide. Or if you want to do absolutely anything then you probably want to do something sick and we dont have to put up with that in america. Not like europe where its all fags and women that think theyr men.
Part of the entire idea of civilisation is that you accept restrictions on your personal freedom. Try imagining a true libertarian society
ITs because the government never let us have one, the human race always had a government and of course it wont let us have a true librarian sociaty because thats bad for the goverment it cant control us then. So it makes us not have that but we should.
our decision to stay an armed populace is a free choice which we've already made.
It certainly wasn't mine, I was just born here.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
The fact that Hitler targeted commies doesn't mean anything. So did Stalin ...
Nothing I've read has suggested that Stalin was any more socialist than the Nazis. Both were essentially oppressive toliterantian regimes which wrapped themselves in ideology to try to keep the people's loyalty.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
. My point is that mass murder and Naziism correlate 100%, while mass murder and socialism correlate very poorly. Some capitalist countries (quite a few, actually
damnit, there's only one 'I' in Nazism !!!!!!!!!
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Dumb, dumb, dumb. You are soooooo pathetic.
Ouch. Someone please whack my above comment down a few points :/
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
The reference to "high" taxes as part of the deginition of socialism is problematical. Taxes in a nation can only be high or low by comparison to taxes in other nations and there's no reason why taxes in a socialist state will of necessity be higher than taxes in a non-socialist state. Taxes may be lower, and used for social good or in a redistributive way rather than for other purposes (eg a space program, armamants, building a big temple for the local god, building a big monument for the ruler etc.)
damnit, there's only one 'I' in Nazism !!!!!!!!!
Urgh. You're right. I goofed. Damn, that's shameful.
But there's two 'm's in "dammit", dammit! Hahahahaha!
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
All this should, however, not distract from the fact that the objective part of his rebuttal of Bezroukov's article is very much to the point. Like him, I am suprised that Bezroukov's article made it through the reviewing of First Monday (but maybe their reviewing is generally weak, I don't know). Having reviewed many scientific papers myself, I don't understand how an article that is loaded with obvious flamebait, is misinterpreting some of its references, and is lacking a convincing internal development can be accepted for publication.
Chilli
PS: While it may be a pity that ESR wrote an emotionally loaded response, I think, everybody should keep in mind that in the end this is his personal responce to the article. Like everybody else he has a right to defend himself verbally in public. That doesn't make him less important or less insightful...it only shows that he is a human being with emotions.
-=- Just a random lambda hacker
Dumb, dumb, dumb. You are soooooo pathetic.
Yeah, that showed 'im! You sure proved him wrong!
Dumbass.
His remarks are now obviously merely his opinions and not in the interests of The Community.
I'm sorry, but whenever anyone recieves too much power there is a much greater chance of corruption.
"While I have made a point of not gratuitously waving my politics around in my papers, it is no secret in the open-source world that I am a libertarian, a friend of the free market, and implacably hostile to all forms of Marxism and socialism (which I regard as coequal in evil with Naziism)."
Pretty contradictory to me. And I think ESR should definitely get out of his little hole and check what Marxism and socialism really are. He is deeply confused with the Stalinist application of Communism. All in all, this vision is very american, on the redneck side.
Short reminder: almost all of the European Union countries are led by socialists. Okay, it's now called "social-democracy", but we *never* experienced any Stalinist methods from our governments (the opposite, mostly).
Once again, I'm really disappointed by ESR's comments (mostly FUD nowadays), and the fact this guy is seen as THE OSS "leader". I find this guy dangerous. He mixes strong political opinions (which, you've guessed, I don't share) with some actual achievements (OSS, Linux...). So far, OSS and Linux have been developped in a very socialist way (not communist), in the most noble sense of the word. And it works. IMO, ESR is just trying to appropriate this movement to serve his own political views and interrests.
He calls himself a libertarian, but openly promotes the idea of World Domination(TM), which is what we're fighting through OSS. We all want to have the choice, and the freedom to choose. I don't think World Domination(TM) goes into that direction. ESR also had pretty stupid comments regarding BeOS, claiming it was doomed since it's not Open Source, and basically foreseeing the doom of all closed source OSes and apps.
Thank you Mr Raymond, but keep preaching your nonsense somewhere else. The "go my way or be doomed" smells like the naziism you think you're against and you give me nausea.
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
It is unfortunate that the open source v closed source "debate" always seems to degenerate into a profoundly uninteresting discussion of politics, ego and other things not worth spending much time on. Perhaps the two cannot be separated but I think they can.
The amateur debate about the definition socialism and all the rest is easy enough to ignore, and I do. What few contributors to this thread seem to be interested in (though there are some) is the software that results.
Often, the "discussion" here reminds me of the worst of usenet. I should just stick to the articles.
e-s-r, r-m-s, m-o-u-s-e
One might also point out that the value system of scientists and businessmen are different. Let's face it, after achieving a certain point in living standards, material goods become only a small facet of lifestyle. People forget that money is only an intermediate exchange between what they would like (health, travel, whatever). For the pure scientists, nothing is more exciting than being out in the field, exchanging debates with colleagues and satisfying their curiosity. If, on the other hand, a manager enjoys satisfaction in crushing competitors, controlling the system and acting as a petty tyrant, then they will act in that way (with predictable results). Fortunately the capitalistic society allows people to have some degree of choice over their life, provided they are not economic slaves to external programmed conventions. As Buddha once noted, desire leads to suffering so it all comes down to what you desire in life and what you are willing to sacrifice to achieve it. The gift culture is one aspect of hackerdom where the desire is for peer respect which has to be earned, not bought. All the other economic analysis is related to the economic landscape of the times where portions of the system react against other forces. While the details of the shift may be debated by academics over the coming years, participating in the fray is more fun :-).
LL
The nazis, too, believed in state owned enterprise.
No, Nazism was far closer to the libertarian/Americapitalist ideal of business controlling the state, rather than vice-versa. They never nationalized anything. There was a symbiotic relationship there, but it was an entirely different one from what you describe.
Personally, I can't see much of a difference there, but that's why I'm not a libertarian: Because I'm bright enough to admit that a large, privately owned, self-perpetuating organization formed for the purpose of profit will inevitably be even more amoral and destructive than a government, given half a chance. This is because a government can be so constructed as to be responsive to the desires of the people it fucks with, while a business doesn't work that way at all. In a non-centralized economy, that is. In a centralized economy, that responsiveness can be implemented, but as it turns out, governments are just as dangerously ill-suited to running businesses as businesses are to running governments. It seems to be a sort of a church'n'state kinda thing. The two tasks are so radically different that you really need two radically different sorts of organizations to perform them. Then again, Americans don't like separation of church and state, either. They want their churches and Exxon to get together and run the country into the ground cooperatively. Goddamn idiots. We deserve what we get, and we'll get it good and hard one of these days.
what is linux? Linux - a programming project by Linus Torvalds when he was a student, released the source code to everyone NOT bcoz he is into OSS, BUT bcoz he needs HELP and is too clueless to finish Linux! Linux is a good OS, and its a great help for programmers that the source code is there...that's it..what's all the fuzz about linux??! Linux is popular due to the wide-spread anti-M$ campaign..let us all be honest here..there are people who is using linux JUST bcoz its not M$...but ofcourse there are also people who really likes linux.. if i wanted to have a really good free UNIX OS, i'd go to FreeBSD, or to other BSD variants.. Alot of people definitely just wants a piece of the action...a piece of the limelight and attention that linux is getting..like..he wants to be considered as "one of the ppl who killed M$"...and one of this ppl is ESR...jjeezzz..he keeps on talking like a girl...i dont see any REAL contribution he is doing right now??!! he doesnt even contribute to the kernel..he actually have written some software but thats about it.. ESR..stop talking and start coding...
While I agree with most of what ESR says in his responses to many of Bexroukov's objections, he relies on works other than "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" to make most of his points. Seeing as the original criticisms were based primarily on what is said in CatB ("Homesteading the Noosphere" was mentioned, once) shouldn't Raymond have stuck with this?
Thank GOD. I was beginning to think I was the only one who remembered that ESR's politics, whether they are right or wrong, are not the issue here. What is the issue is whether the "rebuttal" actually rebutted ESR's ideas, or whether it found ideas it could rebutt and then labelled them ESR's.
Not only do I think it clear that the latter is the case (Bezroukov uses exactly one quote from ESR in the whole of the paper), but I remain puzzled as to why someone chose to describe it on Slashdot as "well-written." It is clearly not. Rather than illuminating the issues, it buries them under pretentious mud-slinging such as "messianic overtones" and "magic solution" and "fundamentalist thinking" and "vulgar Marxist." I don't even know whether Bezroukov is even capable of articulately disputing ESR's ideas; if he were, why would he have chosen instead to dispute his own (hardly accurate) descriptions of ESR's ideas, and even the manner in which ESR promotes his ideas? Bezroukov chooses to chide ESR for describing his ideas with the words "open source," which he calls "a nice term ... but just a nice term." Should Bezroukov really be implying that ESR uses buzzwords instead of meaningful terms, in an article subtitled "Critique of Vulgar Raymondism" (a phrase that Bezroukov never defines at all)?
Scarcity is the rule in the history and pre-history of man. Services will be rationed, it's just a fact. As I said, I prefer to not grant this power to governments as then the decision as to who gets and who gets denied services will be based on politic considerations. It may be no "fairer" to allow these things to be worked out by marketplace forces, but at least it doesn't lead to political tyranny.
I may also fear the tyranny of scarcity, that there are "haves" and "have nots". This is what motivates me to be productive. I believe that I have control over this and that ultimately, it is the way of nature. Look around, those who produce and take care succeed and those who don't lose out. (Now I'll get called a "Social Darwinist" or some such crap). The tyranny of an evil, even democratic government, is much more difficult to fight.
With a well framed government with appropriate and working restrictions and checks and balances, your concerns should be minimized.
You yourself pointed out that Europeans "saw no need" for Constitutional guarantees for basic freedoms.
An all-inclusive government system is not evil in and of itself, but if it gets in the wrong hands, which democracy alone has NO mechanism to prevent, it is extremely evil. I don't advocate anarchy. I advocate limited government. I believe government has some important functions, like defense of it's own values against Hitlers and Stalins, adjudicating disputes and enforcing rights, property rights among them. These are about the limits of government power I trust. If a government tries to grab the power it needs to be totalitarian, it will have to set up the mechanisms first. If those mechanisms are already in place through ever more expansive cradle-to-grave government provided services, it's a lot easier. Only in an environment where we insist on limited government power will the people consistently oppose an evil government trying to grab the power to enforce tyranny.
As I said, there's a reason why the US form of government has outlived all the others. It doesn't need to be radically reformed or overthrown because it is inherently stable. The government can't get too much power and the people prosper.
I'm not at all offended at your slights about how this is a uniquely "American" view. There's a lot to be proud of in an American view. American's have defended the world against horrible tyrants for the last 100 years (you know, those Hitlers and Stalins that you find so distasteful). American's have, over time, had the most productive institutions, be it Education, people flock to American schools of higher learning like nowhere else, technology - Linus came to California, for example, people come to America to be productive more than they go to Europe, I wonder why if Europe is such a paradise on earth? - or business (the center of the business world is New York, I'm told).
I tire of Europeans lecturing Americans on our "backward" system while we fight their wars for them (Iraq, Kosovo, WWII, WWI), help to rebuild Europe after it was decimated by WWII (Marshall plan) and generally have the institutions that everyone ELSE tries to emulate.
People give lip service to respecting differences, except when that difference is capitalism vs. socialism. To these same people, who respect all sorts of social conventions, capitalism is just a horror that must be brought down at all costs.
You can avoid using fetchmail by enabling forwarding on incoming mail servers. Otherwise Your password is transmitted (by fetchmail) to a POP3 server every 10 minutes or so. The chances are, depending in Your setup, it is transmitted in clear text.
That's called `Democracy'. You make decisions as a community, you abide democratically constructed rules.
I find it interesting that noone has so far mentioned the huge discrepancies between voting participation in the US and Europe. In Holland the typical participation for national elections is over 80 %. In the US, it is less than 50%, I believe.
True - Sun _owns_ StarOffice, but why did they buy it? If a program is free, even though it is not freely distributable, and a company buys it with the sole purpose of getting people to rely on it so they can drop support and force people to convert to their for-pay product, that is a Wrong Thing (TM) reminicent of M$.
I believe programmers _should_ get paid for their work, but those who freely contribute to the development of a product are generous - period. They can bit*h and whine about who took what, but they put in the hours and I for one am grateful.
I completely agree that Redhat needs to share the wealth by making some donations, particularly in light of M$'s current and historical attempts to make institutions 100% Micro$coff by giving away their product.
I can't respond any more for a couple days since I won't be around a computer (can you saw withdrawl?) so go ahead and last-word the topic if you like.
That is a very clear and precise description of the main problem in ESR's writings --- well said, Jon.
ESR's role probably serves a useful function for those that believe that horses will die unless led to water, but it is a million miles away from the antiseptic dissection of a complex subject that one would and should expect in a rational scientific study. From what we've seen so far over the years, that won't change, so I suppose we'll just have to lower our expectations or look to more dispassionate commentators whose analyses are less dogmatically coloured by personal preferences in other areas.
None of this should really surprise us though. There has never been much in common between the popular press and the scientific press in other walks of life. We have our own popular press and our own self-styled popular writers, and we should acknowledge them as such and no more.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I for once agree with Eric Raymond. Both
Marxism/communism and nazism are fundamentally
the same. Their core belief is totalitarian
society. I have a right to say so. I've spent 27
years of my life living in such a society. As to
'american rednecks', let me point out that
disproportionally large number of american
academia still worship Marxism and communism.
Those people should truly be called american
REDnecks. Quite paradoxal situation, I would say.
The products of 'academic freedom' advocate the
system which fundamental unfree, and furthermore
ostracized everyone not agreed with them.
Grunt. Oink, oink.
In his reply ESR addressed very few points of Mr. Bezrukov article.
Abstract of Nickolay's paper states:
Eric Raymond's bazaar model provides a too simplistic view of the open source software (OSS) development process. This paper tries to explore links between open source software development and academic research as a better paradigm forOSS development. Open source software development should better be viewed as a special case of academic research. Viewing OSS this way probably can lead to a better understanding of open source phenomena.
It is _NOT_ said that the aim of the whole paper is to criticize Raymond. In my opinion Nikolay's paper raises many important questions (dismissed by ESR as 90% part which "doesn't address or refute my work at all").
I disagree with ESR that it's "hard to draw something of value from this paper", I personally had rather good reading. I disagree with ESR that this latter part of the paper does "repeat observations that other people (including Jamie Zawinski, Alan Cox, Andrew Leonard, and myself)". "Repeating" other's ideas is more an ESR's own approach (in his words, they are "incorporated it into later versions" of CtB, etc). Instead, the paper by Bezrukov _explicitly_ quotes people, selection of these quotes, order in which they are put -- constitutes major part of his work.
Ask yourself how ESR learned about the phrase of Edgar Allan Poe quoted at the end of his reply. I think it was applied to his "work" first, that's IMO is more justifiable.
I am sure Raymond realized that some people will take offense at his statement of his political views. I am sure he also realized that this comment would start a raging flamewar on Slashdot regarding capitalism vs. socialism, or whatever. However, he realized that causing, or preventing, flamewars on Slashdot is entirely beside the point.
Raymond was not writing for Slashdot readers, he was writing for scholars and academics. CatB and its sucessors were academic papers, and as such, discussion and criticism of them properly belongs in the academic arena. Raymond made his point in order to demonstrate the obvious falsity of Bezroukov's key assertion- that CatB et al. advocate a 'vulgar Marxist' view of open-source software development. That this is false is patently obvious to anyone who has read those papers, but to drive the point home, Raymond made it clear exactly how far he is from advocating any form of Marxism. In doing so, he was perhaps unnecessarily inflamatory, but he realized that the levelheaded thinkers for whome he was writing the rebuttal would be able to tell the difference between an aside and a central point, and focus their attention on the latter.
On a related note, does anyone know where I can find a substantive response to his rebuttal?
Full disclosure: I agree, though not as strongly, with Raymond's views on Marxism. See my sig.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" -Salvor Hardin
I know quite a few people who call themselves Libertarians. I cannot say if they are really Libertarians or not, it's not really my bag. I just wish more people would be "political practicalists" and do what is necessary to keep the world running without a lot of nigh-religious mumbo-jumbo.
-- Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, Part 1, chapter 13, para. 9 (ed. by Edwin Curry, 1994).
I think we can all agree that that is not what we want. I know that I'd like to keep my cable TV.
The bar against moderation AND posting in the same thread clearly *is* important otherwise the system would just spiral out of control, but alas it means that contributors end up posting little "Please moderate up" messages.
Maybe this means that there should be a second counter per article, holding a Please Up/Down count.
Be that as it may, it's good to read well-balanced items like that posted by Lord of the Files above.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It only took Europe 200 years to learn from the example of the United States that individual liberty is a good thing.
I wonder if these laws will actually be enforced to protect unpopular opinions, like Pro-Nazi views. I'll bet that Pro-Nazi views fall under the "public safety" exception. Somehow, people don't understand that Freedom of Expression is in place to protect unpopular views. Popular views don't need to be protected.
The word for valuing life above liberty is "slavery". I'll fight and die for freedom just as my ancestors did, unless I remain convinced the general populace doesn't want to be free and thus we can never win.
ESR's "great ability as a writer" is nothing more than his ability for demagogy. And he _CERTAINLY_ "far above most technical people in that regard".
The code he has written is trivial, and overhyped.
Is it anything like "Nazism"? You know with Hitler and the swastikas, and the killing? That's what the context would lead me to believe...
seriously, just because ESR didn't spell check his document doesn't mean we should just start adopting misspellings as new words.
I don't have a problem with people making spelling errors, I make them all the time, but I don't want to see people repeating them...
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
My dictionary lists seventeen definitions of "free". They range from "free verse" to "free electron." Which one precisely does the "free" in "free software" refer to?
It ain't political liberty. Add "Free Software" to the US Constitution right next to "Free Speech" and it will be as out of place as a turd in a punchbowl. And if you did manage to get "Free Software" enacted into law, would all the non OSS developers have to go to jail? Would cops show up at their door demanding copies of the source code so that it could be published in a public place?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
His reply proves it.
simply ignore him, he is an idiot.
That's California, which is culturally almost a different country. If you move somewhere with sane people who believe in self-reliance, you should be okay until the US federal government finally goes fascist on us.
There have been all sorts of arguments over the years about whether various things are Marxist. In the United States, it's become a good way to shoot down ideas without giving them much thought, which is probably one of the reasons ESR avoids describing Open Source in those terms.
Forgetting Stalin for the moment and going back to Marx, it is definitely true that RMS in particular has given the workers the means of production (speaking especially of gcc at the moment), and while RMS emphasizes Free Software as being more akin to free speech than to free beer, there is much to be said for the fact that it makes the software more widely accessible, and this makes a lot of people uneasy. How it comes to pass that some people equate sharing information with a Stalinist police state is beyond me.
Software isn't like money: I don't have any less of it for my having shared it with others, and this is the key to recognizing the fallacy behind many of the [Open Source | Free Software] = Marxism arguments. The "from each according to their abilities" notion is obsolete in this context. Nobody is insisting upon taking the means of production or anything else away from the bourgeouisie; it's no longer necessary. We're just talking about making more copies of the means of production, which is trivially easy to do once it's written. The Free Software = Marxism argument resembles an argument that modern agriculture is Marxist because it helps prevent poor people from starving in such large numbers: it's only seeing half the picture and thereby causing something good to appear evil.
It appears that ESR has read lots of Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, etc. Perhaps he ought to read more Marx in order to be better able to point out the distinct differences between Open Source and Marxism.
On a slightly different topic: abuse of patent law and copyright law by corporations is a (generally successful) attempt by corporations to make more money through regulation. Corporations that complain about regulation generally aren't opposed to regulation in principle; they just want only those regulations that make money for them. Patent and copyright law exist in fact only because the government recognizes and enforces patents and copyrights. At corporate urging, the United States is almost the only country in the world to grant patents to software. In a true laissez-faire system, existing software patents, copyrights, and licenses could be safely ignored, software piracy would be rampant, and the shrinkwrap software industry would wither. It's ironic that Communist China is the most often cited major market for pirated software! So much for Socialism and its excessive regulation!
-------------------------------------------------- but I seem to be banned from moderating. Dunno why, I only ever had time to moderate one or two posts, hardly enough of a sample to be marked an abuser - --
:)
-----------------------------------------------
it'll get back around to ya. it's kinda random, and you've only got your points for three days.
i like your idea about transfering your karma to someone else, btw.
"The things we wizards have to put up with."--Jethro Bodine
The smiley is in the original.
In one of the earlier posts, someone asked about Mr. Bezroukov's credentials. I think the questioon would be best answered by pointing to the site http://www.softpanorama.org/
So, although roughly 100% of the commentary here has been completely irrelevant to the subject at hand (the merit of Bezroukov's critique and of Raymond's reply), and instead indulged in mostly juvenile personal opinions on other matters entirely, that's all Raymond's fault. The posters here bear no responsibility for the content of their remarks.
I see.
Now was it really necesary to misrepresent what I said in order to mock me? Grow up.
Excuse me, but that is one of the most amazing statements I have ever read in my entire life. I just cannot believe that you really believe that.
What evidence do you have to support that assertion? Do you have any evidence whatsoever, or is it just your own blind prejudices speaking?
What if (hypothetically) I am a black man born to a ghetto area with huge unemployment, terrible schooling, lucky to reach 21 without being shot (perhaps I exaggerate a little, but you get the gist), and the only jobs I can get are crap like flipping burgers, sweeping streets? Do you think I can get independently wealthy flipping burgers my entire life? Man, what planet are you on?
Maybe you're thinking I can start my own business or something? How am I going to do anything like that when I have no money, no good opportunities, and am faced by endemic racism? Even if I somehow manage to start a business and work hard for 60 hours a week and die young from a heart attack caused by overwork, isn't it very possible I'll never be "independently wealthy"?
Do you know anything about what it is really like to be poor?
I'll stop there. You realise I'm being very restrained here.
Female Prison Rape in NY
Female Prison Rape in NY
>Well, gee. So making Raymond pay some extra taxes on his precious income is equivalent to murdering 10.5 million innocent people? Really. What an interesting notion. Equivalent? no but similar. Taxes are collected by the threat of armed force. When you refuse to pay them men with guns will show up to collect the taxes at the point of a gun. If you try to defend yourself they will kill you. I guess the only differance is some socialists can be bribed, others can't
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
I guess it's time I reread the history.
> Well, gee. So making Raymond pay some extra taxes on his precious income is equivalent to murdering 10.5 million innocent people? Really. What an interesting notion.
And the government uses its "income" money, to fund wars that we have no business being in the FIRST place. INDIRECTLY you're income is being used to kill people. THAT'S the point.
Instead of wasting money killing people, why don't address the issues in our OWN country first.
Apparently you've never heard the old axiom: "No man has the right to be taxed without his consent."
Cheers
I have not met ESR, and I'm not so sure I would like him if I did.
To elaborate on problems I have with him:
He has this battle cry he keeps using: "I just want to live in a world where software doesn't suck." Notwithstanding the very narrow focus of this life goal, it differs quite a lot from his litmus test of software quality: "What's the license?"
I am a BeOS person and I know for a fact that a good closed source operating system can be made. In fact, it is better in today's climate, because it has less legal problems encumbering it (such as getting code to run certain hardware). So I differ greatly with ESR on that.
I also have the impression that he has an ego of sufficient size to make him widely resented and get in the way of compromising on anything, or getting along with certain people. Certainly a person that took it upon himself to go into the spotlight like that ought to conduct himself better than he does.
And while he's right about not stuffing his libertarian pro-gun views into his essays, he certainly hangs them out there practically everywhere else. And his depiction of communism as Pure Evil was also uncalled for. I am not a communist, but come on - this is not the cold war. His politics should be kept in their own section on his web site, IMHO.
The big question about ESR is whether we want him or not. It would be a Good Thing if more businesses start seeing things our way. On the other hand, it is debatable whether ESR is helping this goal with his speaking skills and constant traveling and visiblity, or hurting it with his ego and poor ability to get along with others.
That said, I still respect him for his intelligence, the code he wrote and maintained, and because his intentions are good and perhaps he just can't tell when he rubs people the wrong way.
And regarding the critique posted earlier, I think the guy that wrote it is clearly a flake and absolutely rehashed stuff other people said earlier and better. And he grossly misread those essays. ESR put him in his place in this case, though unfortunately he also let his ego come through loud and clear.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Can you point out one valid, original point in the entire journal article?
I entirely agree with ESR that, though it was both true and original, where it was true, it was not original, and where it was original, it was not true.
Female Prison Rape in NY
Cough.... if you really think this is true, you haven't spent *any* time in an academic community. Professors have consulting gigs, and start companies to commercialize their ideas just as much as in the Open Source community. In fact, I would say it's much more common for Professors to do so; there's certainly many more worked examples of such.
Exhibit one: RSA DSI, was formed by MIT professors to commercialize the RSA public key algorithm, and it has been argued that it has done more to stop the usage of RSA than any government ban on encryption export could have ever done....
In my mind, the rules change when the person in question is unable to assault me. IMHO an in-person debate is inherently far less honest.
I understood what ESR meant, and it wasn't foolish at all. The author obviously hadn't bothered to read ESR's papers properly at all, and neither had the peer reviewers, if any . In the event, it got posted on /. and did spark some interesting further debates (I don't know whether this "added anything to the debate" but it might have done). So in that sense it might have added something to the debate, but only in the very weak sense that a bomb attack adds something to the Israel/Palestine debate.
Female Prison Rape in NY
Sorry, pal, If you are worried about someone else's hunger, Then YOU feed him instead of stealing MY TV. The problem is you want the moral credit for feeding somebody, but you are too cheap to pay for it, So you want to stick me with the bill. Socialism is nothing more than part-time slavery.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Sendmail could be responsible for more security holes and hair loss than any other computer program in history, and the "real opensource" (trouble with your space bar?) guys now seem to be selling a proprietary version. Color me unimpressed.
> Rights are a construct of man, a consept. and they are not inherent to anything
..."
By that logic we would never have any "rights" to be free.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain una-lien-able Rights,
(una-lien-able emphasis mine, as the word un-alien-able didn't exist at the time of the writing.)
I think you need to look up "Rights" and "Privileges" in Black's Law dictionary and stop confusing the two.
Cheers
Your views on Raymond's politics, his ego, his essays, his pronouncements on the term "GNU/Linux", his skills at diplomacy or lack thereof, his abilities as a "leader", or alleged unwillingness to admit himself wrong, and sundry personal qualities have nothing whatsoever to do with the question at hand.
By equating Socialism with Nazism, ESR himself deflected the argument from what it should have been (the relative merits of CatB and Bezroukov's critique) to an argument about Raymond's politics. IMHO, he must have known this would happen. What he was thinking, I'll never know.
The above comment(ESR should go out sometimes) never proported to be discussing the strength of ESR's response...In fact, no mention at all was made of Bezroukov's critique. The comment dealt purely with ESR's rather gratuitous attack of socialism.
You can't equate a group of people with Nazi's and expect the group to stand idly by. One must wonder what Raymond's motives were for including such a remark.
I guess that's not really fair. I can give him the benefit of the doubt. It was probably just a thoughtless remark...but a simple apology might go a long way towards appeasing many whom he offended.
I live in Finland and I can tell you why Finland and other Nordic countries are so good in high tech: anyone here can become a techie if he/she has what it takes and really wants to. It is not a question of money. Our universities are probably not quite as good as MIT or Caltech, but they are good enough and you do not have to take huge loans or have rich parents to go to them. This of course is true with other, less technical professions as well.
The conclusion is that the traditional, completely free capitalistic economy used to work well during the industrial period, but in a high tech society it is starting to appear less and less appealing. There is no more need for large numbers of industrial workers. Services simply can not absorb all those people and in the future technology will eventually diminish the number of people needed in services as well. What will they do if higher education is denied from them? Will they simply starve and occasionally have some leftover temporary job, or will they rebel at some point?
Well, gee. So making Raymond pay some extra taxes on his precious income is equivalent to murdering 10.5 million innocent people? Really. What an interesting notion.
I daresay that the "coequal evil" to which Eric refers, is the mass killings that have been perpetrated in the name of socialism: Stalin's starvation programs, Pol Pot's attempt to eliminate all intellectuals in Cambodia, Mao's Cultural Revolution, etc.
Socialists are every bit as evil as NAZIs. NAZIs just managed to wreak their havoc in a much shorter time.
And while I'm joining the hairs you're trying to split, don't forget that the NAZIs were self-declared socialists. (Nazional Zozialisticher Deutcher Arbeits Partei.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I should have figured that out, but most people usualy just call him 'linus'
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Year,
:-) and knew what he is talking about, but he is not!
my subject is provocing! I felt as many here to answer ESR for his provocing thesis that marxism is as evil as naziism.
I dont know, but Marx was german and Naziism (Hitler) was a german desease.
Well, I was very angry yesterday because I had the impression (from some mailing lists) that ESR had read some books
But many of you aren't either.
In short: I live in Karlsruhe, germany. This is nearly the center of europe. Berlin is about 4h per train, Paris is about 4h per train, London is about 6h, Munich 3h, Rome 8h, Florenz 9h, Amsterdam about 4h, Madrid 10h, Kopenhaagen 6h, Stockholm 10h, Athen 14h, Lisboa (Lissabon) 10h. This is per train, per plane you have substancial shorter times: Athens, Porto, Lisboa, London, Paris: all 3h-5h.
My address is:
Angelo Schneider
Putlitzstr. 24
76137 Kalrsruhe
+49 721 9812467
angelo.schneider@xcc.de
Give me a FAX if you like to see the real world.
I've never seen so mutch trash written about, europe, social democracy, comunism, socialism, democracy, capitalism and so on as here!
If you like to visit it and to see it come over here, I have some spare place for you.
BTW.: I would never visit a country with over 40.000 murders per year. So don't invite me to the US, I won't come!
(US: inhabitants: 290,000,000, murders > 40,000,
Europe: inhabitants: 360,000,000, murders 2,000)
US: parties: 2
Europe: parties: each country about 5 to 10
Sombody wrote:
we have not the right to choose a doctor we want.
Where did you get that?
We have not the right to wear guns?
We have. But you need a license! Don't you have driving licenses too? Everybody my wear a gun but you need a license to drive a car? Huuuu!
We are not alowed to eat american beef?
Where did you get that? We do not wan't THAT
beaf you are exporting to europe countries!
And so we pay the american TRADE TAX PUNISHMENT
because our children are more worth than that punishment.
Regards,
Angelo,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I get a strong feeling that people aren't really discussing the same thing. Perhaps we should select some baseline definitions:
Socialism, Communism VS Capitalism:
Workers own the means of production. Or, the community owns the means of production. Hmmm - OpenSource, GPL, seems to fit this. Capitalism, company owns the means of production. - MicroSoft.
Libertarianism - in general calls for less government, and more individual liberties. I think almost all Libers will agree that some government is needed... and that some public goods are needed also (like highways, dams, etc...)
If you look closely at all modern nation-states, you'll find that there is a significant amount of socialism, even in the USA. Nothing is prue in real life.
I'm sorry, but whenever anyone recieves too much power there is a much greater chance of corruption.
And that, my friend, si the crux of the argument! (Smile), now we're getting somewhere.
To be more specific than my last post, I consider my self (to make up a term) a pragmatic socialist. At this point I don't feel that utopian socialism is feasable. I advocate socialism on a smaller scale. I also think the ISO (International Socialist Organization) are generally a bunch of extremist nuts.
The "Industry", capitalists all, see Open Source as free razors (software) to sell more of their razor-blades (hardware).
Hackers with no political or economic axes to grind see Open Source as individuals freed to produce great things.
The computer industry press see it as a hype machine that brings out endlessly fascinating stories.
It's like the Elephant and the Blind Men. Each one "sees" the Elephant as something from their "point of view" based on their background and experiences.
RMS has it right. It's not really about anything but freedom. Freedom to exchange ideas, whether they are embodied in speech or programs. Freedom is difficult to define and comprehend, but everyone pretty much sees it in a positive light. Everyone relates it to their own utopia.
Huähua!
:-) yust to kid you :-)
"NaZional" sozialistische Deutsche Arbeitspartei
or
"NaZional" sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
both is wrong
The NAZI party was called: Nsdap
"national sozialistische deutsche Arbeitspartei"
Of cource Hitler tried to mobilize the same people Marx/Engels and Lenin/Stalin did.
They had nothing, they where just slaves.
Didn't you know that at the time of the Lenin/Stalin Revolution in the UDSSR 95% of the people where just slaves of the 5% land owners?
Did you ever realize that stalinism was for 75% of that people the "freedom" they ever thought about?
I'm afraid you did't.
Angelo
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
AND I must say Eric IS a nice GUy.
You may disagree with him, and he may have some strong viewpoints, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to easily represent a large diverse community, HOWEVER, HE really does a good PR job for OpenSource. .. and don't be afraid if he's pro-gun, He won't take away your rights to choose.
But Eric does. If Eric felt he had to do something in public to slap Richard upside the head, he wouldn't be the first.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
AND I must say Eric IS a nice GUY .
You may disagree with him, and he may have some strong viewpoints, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to easily represent a large diverse community, HOWEVER, HE really does a good PR job for OpenSource. .. and don't be afraid if he's pro-gun, He won't take away your rights to choose.
...for those who don't seem to get it.
Political definitions
Unfortunately, this was the best I could find with short notice. I say unfortunately, because the definitions aren't 100%, and I don't have a copy of some of my old "-ism" texts from school anymore. Anyways, here goes:
Communism - the political system under which the economy, including capital, property, major industries, and public services, is controlled and directed by the state, and in that sense is "communal."
Marxism - the theory developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which became the official doctrine of communism. According to Marxism, the key to how society operated was economics; all other aspects of society, such as politics and religion, were conditioned by the economic system. Under capitalism, society was divided into two classes: the capitalists who owned the means of production and distribution, and the workers, or proletariat, whose labor was exploited by the ruling class. Marx saw history as a dialectical process in which two opposing forces (thesis and antithesis) generate a third, synthesizing force. According to this view, capitalism would eventually break down because of its own contradictions and this would lead to the proletarian revolution and the establishment of the classless society.
socialism - a political system in which the means of production, distribution and exchange are mostly owned by the state, and used, at least in theory, on behalf of the people. The idea behind socialism is that the capitalist system is intrinsically unfair, because it concentrates wealth in a few hands and does nothing to safeguard the overall welfare of the majority. Under socialism, the state redistributes the wealth of society in a more equitable way, with the ideal of social justice replacing the profit motive.
In short though, Communism (big-C) is the kind practiced in the Soviet Union, had very little left in common with the little-c communism that was proposed by various philosophers. I'm sure RMS can relate.
Communism is a form of socialism, as is Marxism. The Problem is, as with most things, is that they rarely ever survive the transition from paper to practice intact. Socialism is not a _bad_ thing. It just seems to get flummoxed up when applied to reality. Why? Probably because there are still people, and failible people at that running the controls.
apologies for being anonymous
--sugarman--
Eric IS a nice GUY .
You may disagree with him, and he may have some strong viewpoints, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to easily represent a large diverse community, HOWEVER, HE really does a good PR job for OpenSource. .. and don't be afraid if he's pro-gun, He won't take away your rights to choose.
Have you tried American candy lately? [and other food comments]
Well, quit buying the cheap stuff! Just because bad food products are sold doesn't mean good ones are not sold as well.
AND I must say Eric IS a nice GUY .
You may disagree with him, and he may have some strong viewpoints, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to easily represent a large diverse community, HOWEVER, HE really does a good PR job for OpenSource. .. and don't be afraid if he's pro-gun, He won't take away your rights to choose.
I've been trying to figure out what you mean by "socialist," because you must not be using the definition one usually encounters in the US. To an American, it suggests a strong central government, nationalization of many service industries, high taxes and pervasive regulation.
I think the biggest problem that many in the US have with socialism is a pronounced distrust of the government. I would argue that this is simply cynicism brought on by a rather corrupt government. Your first two points are bad only if the government isn't doing things properly. A benign and efficient goverment should not be something to be feared. The mistrust we hold for our goverment is a sad commentary on...well...our government.
As far as high taxes go...well...If the government is efficient, and providing quality services as it should, this should be a non-issue as well.
As far as pervasive regulation goes, well, I would argue that this is in no way inherent in the socialist system...at least no more than, say, a capitalist system.
I fully agree that most people wouldn't respond to someone in public the way they do here, but I for one would love to see a good 'ole fist fight between some of these egos. Just let them get it out of their system. Maybe then they won't have such a need to prove themsleves.
All joking aside, I think that if ESR starts crying because someone was teasing him, then he shouldn't have stuck his neck out. He's responsible for what happens to him since he's the self proclaimed evangelist (or whatever he hides behind these days). By this fact, he is responsible and has no right to complain. If he don't like, he should just quit.
Now you're just talking about bad goverment.
:/
Should have used the preview button.
Eric's reply was a far better piece of work than was Bezroukov's cirtique.
Comparing the work of Bezroukov and Raymond, provides a good example of the slipshod work accepted today in the humanites.
I consider it very telling that an engineer dabbling in antropology does a far better job than a supposedly *professional* social scientist.
See Ayn Rand for a more detailed discussion of why people capable of logic flee the study of the humanities for scientific disciplines.
I notice that you denounce ESR's reply, without addressing even a single one of the points he raised. So on that note: fuck you, too.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So, let's say I'm a young, male African-American born to people under the poverty line. How can I succeed? Work hard? The people that work the hardest make the least money. Horatio Alger is dead and gone.
Is it harder to be black? Absolutely. Is it harder to be fat and ugly? Absolutely. Is it harder with a lack of social skills? Absolutely. "Work harder" doesn't necessarily mean physical labor. It means working a lot of hours in order to go to school at night. It means spending time at the library learning what you can. It means working multiple jobs if necessary.
Show me an able-bodied person still in poverty in the US, and I'll show you someone who sits on his butt doing nothing at night.
And by the way, at my last company the VP of product development was black (with huge stock options). Tell him that The Man kept him down.
Simple: Wealth != Greed. The exact quote is "The love of money is the root of all evil." Note the word "love".
What you don't understand is that a rising tide floats all boats. People getting rich by creating wealth creates jobs for everyone else.
In fact, you're rich compared to people in third world countries. Doesn't that prove that you're greedy? Shouldn't you give away all your wealth and live in a hut? Oh, you won't? Why not?
"Functionality should always come before whether or not it's "free" software by anyone's definition.
:) "
If that were true, there would quite likely be no free software, since you need at least some users to do feature-requesting and bug-finding. IT isn't the beginning and the end of the computer-using world, whatever it might think
It is true ( or at least it should be.)
As soon as people abondon merit in favor of ideology, quality suffers imensely.
However, I think that Eric misses the value in such a paper. Nikolai's paper answers the question "what are the risks in embarking in an open source development project?", and is the most focused and complete answer I've seen so far. That's very valuable from an advocacy perspective, because advocates need a single URL to point to for a thorough treatment of this frequently asked question. Otherwise, a properly skeptical skeptic won't believe that all of the homework on the subject is done.
Are there better treatments of this subject available that are as complete and focused on the question at hand? I think that this document provides a very good starting point if a better document doesn't exist. Even if a better document does exist, this points out some useful anecdotes and quotations worthy of inclusion in any answer to the risk question.
A "brilliant" computer scientist advances knowledge, not political agendas.
And so far, his brialliance has created... fetchmail. Oooh. Aaaah. Great work. I'm impressed.
Hi all!
free market: economic system
democracy: political system
Comunism: social system
capitalism: ideology
Ahm, aren't you mixing something up?
as political systems we know:
democracy, theocraty, monarchy, anarchy, oligarchy etc.
as economic systems we know:
free market, planned market, regulated market etc.
as social system we know:
sozialism, comunism, "soziale marktwirtschaft(?)"
as ideolgies we know:
marxism(comunism), capitalism, anarchy
I have the impression the terms intermix a bit.
But you, americans, tend to intermix everything with everything.
As far as I know, one of the most successfull industrial nation in this world is:
a) democratic (as a political system)
b) comunistic (as a social system)
c) planned market vs. free market/capitalism (as a economic system) the plan for world markets not country wide markets.
d) capitalism (as ideology[the true power is money not democracy])
Question, to be answered by the reader: which country is that?
Hints:
taxes about 80%
Economic/technological planing done my MITI.
Unemployment rate: still lower than 4%
Growth: beyond european and american growth
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
*Gets out the clue stick*
Uh, dude, yer thinking of Richard Stallman. We're talking about Eric Raymond.
*THWAP!*
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
Oops. :\
Okay, so you're deleting the old opensource string, allocating a new 11-byte string off the free store, then copying the first 10 bytes into the constant string "communism". I'm sure the compiler will have a field day with that. ;)
Well, I *am* trying to save some memory here. Heh. Anyway, opensource is a pointer-to-char, so assigning it a new value via new would do the right thing - why would the compiler have a fit over that?!
--
All to often it seems that we're taking underinformed writers a bit too seriously. While Nikolai was entitled to his criticism (read: analysis. Too many critics write criticisms, or 'downers' on an original work. I remember studies of criticism where an author would properly analyze a work. Nikolai wrote a rebuttal, not a criticism.) and ESR was also quite entitled to his rebuttal of the rebuttal. ;)
Anyway, back to the original point at hand- all to often we see people of the mentality of commercial+closed-source writers, or people never exposed to the OSS culture, dismiss OSS persons as being crackpots, loonies, morons, etc... etc... it's hard to write a factual document and trying o get a serious response from a person of this mindset...
...similarly, it can be a real pain to write an article with a closed source viewpoint without being flamed, en masse, by the OSS community.... while this is *not* true for the whole, the overwhelming bulk of rebuttal mail is embarassing.
So we have two options- be a closed source writer, and be dubbed closed minded, or be an open source advocate, and be ridiculed.
It's a crazy world, I think. In the mean time, I think I'm going to take a hot bath, while the world sorts itself inside my head. I'm not going to touch my computer for another.... oh, an hour will do it...
...I need some fresh air.
You'll eat it and you'll like it.
My official response is not enough sleep.
It's not a "wrong" thing, it is a "Buisness" thing. Why didn't Caldera, Redhat, Suse or whomever not purchase the company if they were so fond of it? I'm sure they had the money, at least Redhat did. A company must make as much money as possible by legal means, that is how buisness works. That money in turn goes to feed the families of Sun employees. It's great to label companies like MS and Sun as "evil" but fact of the matter is that because of them the economy rolls along. I'm sure if Redhat thought it could get away with it then it would happily purchase Caldera and Suse, thereby cornering the Linux commercial market. There are no good guys in buisness. C'est la vie
Question everything. Mistrust authority - promote decentralization. Our community leaders are not excempt from this - we should question them often and in depth, because if we don't they'll be unprepared for what the rest of the world will. To paraphrase Buddha - "do not accept anything at first.. but if after careful consideration it agrees with your view, accept it and live by it." I know I mangled the quote, but you get the idea - in so many words question everything.
--
Where McCarthy went wrong, is that he exaggerated the risk of communism in America, and willingly ran roughshod over our civil rights, in the name of protecting us from an ideology that doesn't even pretend to acknowledge our civil rights.
IOW, McCarthy tried to fight communism with the methods of communism: guilt by accusation, show trials, etc.
Communism is evil. The fact that McCarthyism is *also* evil, in no way mitigates the venal brutality of communism.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
And what happens the next day when that same person is hungry again, and the other guy doesn't have a TV? That's the fallacy of socialism and why these seemingly simple ideas always fail.
No, that's a display of your inability to think metaphorically. When I say "feed", think "educate and if necessary feed". Something laissez-faire capitalists always forget (aside from the fact that we've tried that, and it just fucked over a lot of people) is that in a capitalist society there will *always* be some unemployed. If there weren't any unemployed, there'd be no labor pool to draw from. New businesses would be extremely difficult to found. The capitalist system would probably deadlock.
At any rate, you seem (like too many other uninformed people here) to equate socialism with the Communist governments around the world. Sorry, but it's not the same thing. If you want to see socialism, visit Europe sometime. It seems to be working pretty nicely there.
Say what you will about ESR, but the man pulls no punches. I agree with him; Nikolai Bezroukov's critique of CatB was presented as a scholarly examination yet he failed to employ basic scholarly techniques. Granted, there is nothing wrong with disagreeing with ESR but make sure you do your homework before making it available to the world.
I love that quote by Poe, by the way. It's often overused but in this case it's fitting.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
I have a lot of knowledge of the education industry in the US, and I will tell you that ANYONE can get grants or students loans to go to a good college. Maybe not Cal Tech or MIT, but you don't have to go to a "name" school to get a good education. Most schools offer night or weekend classes for working adults. There is absolutely NO excuse for someone not to be able to get a college education.
the government uses its "income" money, to fund wars that we have no business being in the FIRST place. INDIRECTLY you're income is being used to kill people. THAT'S the point.
No, that wasn't Raymond's point at all. His point appears to have been some nonsense about how taxing people excessively is equivalent to killing them -- or else some equally absurd nonsense about holding every single socialist on earth responsible for the acts of every single other socialist on earth (which is not only loony (see other posts about the absurdity of the same principle if applied to capitalism), but also contrary to libertarian principles of individual responsibility.)
I'm not at all sure where you're getting this from. I don't live in a socialist country, and the wars that my country (the USA) does get involved in are more often than not instigated by the right wing "capitalist" contingent. Why? Damned if I know, but it may have something to do with who profits from wars around here, namely something that Dwight D. Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex". That term has been thrown around so often and so carelessly in the intervening years since Ike coined it, that it has begun to sound a bit silly. Still, regardless of what it sounds like, he had a very strong point and it's worth thinking about, whether you agree with his views or not.
Apparently you've never heard the old axiom: "No man has the right to be taxed without his consent."
Just becaue it's an "old axiom" doesn't make it true, and anyway I think you mean "Every man [and women too, I presume] has a right not to be taxed without his consent". (Sorry, but I've been coding all day and I have a weird compulsion to clarify boolean expressions at the moment
Uh, oh, yeah. That principle of yours is on mighty shaky ground. How safe would you have felt, say, twenty years ago, if our armed forces (including NORAD) had been supported by voluntary donations? Not so damned safe at all, I suspect. Most people simply wouldn't have paid, for the same reason so many people don't vote: Their little bit really doesn't make that much difference, as far as they can tell. And when money is involved, then they look at the stack of bills on the table and the kid's worn-out shoes, and they say "to hell with it, I'll kick a few bucks for some warheads next month". Seriously, that's how it would go. I'm not condoning the obscene waste that happens in the defense industry, nor the pork-barrel crap that Congress spends its time on. What I'm saying is that there are, IMHO inarguably, certain expenses which we as a nation must meet. In many cases everybody benefits, whether they like it or not, there is no way to deny the benefits to those who don't help foot the bill. There are some respects in which we are all in this together, and we haev no choice in the matter. NORAD defends tax evaders just like they defend me (and believe me, I do take a hit on the old paycheck every month). This annoys me, up to a point, but it would annoy me a great deal more if tax evaders were treated just the same as people like me who pull their weight. You don't like it? Tough. Leave. Most of us in this country aren't all that thrilled with it either, but we're grown-ups and, as I said, we pull our weight.
Since you seem to be in a mood for axioms, here's another: William F. Buckley once wrote that "as idealism approaches reality, the cost becomes prohibitive." He was talking about how glamorous, simple, one-size-fits-all solutions always end in grief. I don't agree with much that Buckley has to say, and I suspect that he'd never face up to the fact that his own idealism falls into the same category as all the others, but he said a damned shrewd thing there. It's catchy, too.
Your ideal of perfect independence from your society is not practical, because such independence is not possible. It's not even rational. As a vague notion, it makes a fine rhetorical device on Slashdot, but it begins to look crazier and crazier when you start to work out the details of how it would be implemented.
Instead of wasting money killing people, why don't address the issues in our OWN country first.
I couldn't agree more, though I suspect that we'd disagree very bitterly about what's wrong and what, if anything, is to be done about it.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
one "flat" (unthreaded) document.
contain those keys.
Observe this procedere terminating.
Cu, Tilman.
Also, I think a lot of people need to insert the following into thier own startup script:
#undefine COMMUNISM == BAD
Okay, call it pseudo-C, but you get the idea.
The red scare is over folks. And with people like McCarthy able to get in power, I think our system is far from perfect. I am not very political but I do know that talking about things you don't understand is among the worst of evils, more evil than communism supposedly is.
My personal quirps about CatB is that it doesn't account for when OSS fails. And the the original critique explained this expertly. While ESR was using Linux development as his model, he didn't consider that Linux is atypical as such a project.
I many times go to links of abandoned web sites of abandoned OSS projects, enough for the pessimism in me creeps some. I think for the next paper in ESR's series, he should examine why OSS fails and how to avoid this. Such a work would be enlightening to us all.
--
Well, I would rather have "gnawing guilt" than a phony sense of "liberal compassion" while people are addicted to government aid. At least what I feel is honest.
(Not that I actually feel any guilt, by the way.)
It's also one of the most used programs in history, and one of the more complex. Give them a break... it's been a while since a root exploit was discovered in sendmail, yo.
As for the "proprietary" sendmail... it's pretty much just an interface to sendmail. Check your facts.
Marxism and socialism (which I regard as coequal in evil with Naziism).
Well, gee. So making Raymond pay some extra taxes on his precious income is equivalent to murdering 10.5 million innocent people? Really. What an interesting notion.
I always thought this guy was a moron, but that's the least of it; he's a vicious lunatic as well as a moron.
Tell ya what, Raymond: Talk to some people who survived Auschwitz and then lived in Israel in the following couple of decades, when Israel was pretty solidly socialist. Explain to them how the high taxes and bureaucracy they put up with in Israel were just as bad as being used as slave labor and then gassed. Explain that, Eric. I'm sure they'll understand. I'm sure they'll be very pleased that some arrogant jackass has finally explained it all to them.
Hey, I'm not a socialist either, but there are such things as proportion and accuracy. If you're going to shoot your mouth off about something and present yourself as an authority, get it right.
This is just another tedious example of Raymond taking criticism too personally and flying off the handle.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
I remember reading a Usenet post from someone who moved from Norway from California. She said that she paid just as much in taxes "back there", but as opposed to the taxes she paid in Norway, she didn't see the money be put to any good use for the society the "state" was supposed to be for.
I like my freedom.
The U.S. idea of freedom is limited by the allmighty Dollar, by who has the biggest gun (surprise, it's the Government), and that noone gives your name to your fascist War on Drugs. The European idea of freedom, on the other hand, is that you contribute to society, which in return provides, so that you are free to do what you please.
I completely agree.
Thought I might get some insightful commentary on Open Source (which I am no expert on). Instead we get the usual marxism/socialism/capitalism is good/evil/whatever political brouhaha.
Is there ANY way to keep a discussion on Open Source from disintigrating into an argument over systems of government? Anytime such a debate becomes polarized through personal politics there is little to be learned.
has alot of points I think alot of people miss out on. The whole cathedral and the bazaar idea seems a little idealistic to me anyways. Sure open software is great but for the most part users want things to run without tweaking them, things the bazaar has a hard time understanding (at least what I have seen). Cathedrals have the problem of putting too much emphasis on their talents and charge you amazingly exorbant fees to merely license the use of their software without actually owning it. I think ESR goes too far to one extreme and people like Bill Gates go too far to the other. FreeBSD is an excellent example of how the middle ground can be more versatile than either one of the extremes. The BSD license doesn't require you to reproduce the source code yet it states you need to give credit where credit is due. This kind of license doesn't force anyone to do anything except give the person who they based their software on the credit they deserve. Imagine if all the software Microsoft copied was released under the BSD license, it would add another GB to the size of Windows 2000. More to the point, FreeBSD is a successful development model because it's major development and source tree is maintained by a smaller group of individuals yet it remains completely open and free. Smaller groups are much easier to manage than thousands which leads to better organization and cohesion.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
How is it that something which is illegal for one person to do (e.g. a non-voluntary transfer of money) becomes legal when the "community" does it?
First, you are obviously mixing "legal" with "good, moral, just". Legal is what is written in law books, isn't it? So it's because it's written so in the books.
But I also have answer on the question you tried to ask. It's because community is (or intended to be) more than individual, just as a brains is more than neuron and a computer is more than transistor. Ideal communicty combines and amplifies good points of it's members, while masking bad points. The capability of community to do so it the source of additional rights - one who acts (or has chances to act) better should be more capable to act.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
... and it's full of Jews, so Marlon Brando was also "right". People still (rightly) attacked him for the way he expressed his views on the matter. McCarthy was wrong because he wanted to deny (and denied them, since he got that power) the right to be communists.
(He was also wrong in assuming all atheists were communists. It appears your beloved Government hasn't woken up on that yet, and still has that "under God" bit in the Pledge.)
I think you're terribly confused.
I am indeed, but not about this
Some socialist countries may have high taxes, and some communists may have murdered 10.5 million innocent people.
Some communists have murdered a hell of a lot more than 10.5 million people, indeed. And some capitalists have financed death squads. And some libertarians are alcoholics. And some ministers consort with women of ill repute. The thing that all of these "some"'s have in common is: Some do, but most don't. Why not? Well, for example, capitalism is not all about death squads. It may coincide with them, and in fact it sometimes finds them usefull -- but they are not an integral part of the mechanism or principles of capitalism, any more than a democracy is required in principle or in practice to invent moronic cartoon characters like Smokey the Bear.
But you can't say that about Nazism.
It was a fundamental tenet of Nazism that "useless" and/or "inferior" people should be liquidated. It is a fundamental tenet of most forms of socialism that "useless" and/or "inferior" people should be treated with the same respect as everybody else. That's a big difference there. If I had to choose between the two, it wouldn't be tough.
I would hope that you don't mean to characterize those respective schools of political thought on the basis of context-free historical events.
I'm not sure precisely what you mean here, but historical context was very much my point. The oft-expressed libertarian view is something like, "socialism does stuff I don't like and so did the Nazis, so they're the same". Well, they're not the same. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether you object to socialism or not, or even whether you object to Nazism or not (though I hope you'll forgive me if I prefer that you do object). They're just not the same damn thing, that's all. You can go on a reductionism rampage and equate just about anything to anything else at all, simply by ignoring details until what's left is sufficiently vague that it resembles everything on Earth. But what does it prove? Nothing. You can prove that an oven is an icebox by that method. Who cares? (Note to self: Go into business marketing ovens to libertarians: Describe them as iceboxes, and prove by irrefutable logic that the two are morally equivalent. Retire young.)
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Well, quit buying the cheap stuff!
I did. I eat mostly Danish and German marzipan and chocolate, British marmalade (I do like American English muffins, though
Just because bad food products are sold doesn't mean good ones are not sold as well.
I agree.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
hi! :)
I tried to read the criticism. I really did. It was painful.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar was one of the first papers on open source development I had ever read. Believe me it was an eye opener and I go back to read every now and then if I feel bored.
The funny thing is that I didn't even come close to the same conclusions that Nikolai Bezroukov did. Marxist?!?!? The Red Scare is starting to become popular again I guess. Unfortunately most people are a little more clued in these days than they were in the 50's. Otherwise we'd all be screwed over if someone whispered "Commie" and pointed at us while our backs were turned (happened a lot I guess in the McCarthy years).
Nikolai Bezroukov also over-generalizes. Hell I knew that not all open source projects operate Bazaar style. That's just the tendency, not a rule set down in stone.
I have one serious problem with one argument that he makes rather loudly: Authoritarian methods will kill any given Open Source project more effectively than anything else. Woah there, that's a broad blanket statement if I ever saw one. Linux itself operates under a "benevolent dictatorship" model, where one guy says "Okay this is it: Here's our release". GNOME does not (or at least it didn't when 1.0 was released... I hear they've gotten their act together though :^). Guess which software package is stable and fast? Okay, maybe that's comparing apples and bananas, but you see my point. :^)
You *need* authoritarianism for *any* software package to work, OSS or not. Someone has to be the boss. Otherwise you get the problem of "too many chefs spoil the broth" a la GNOME 1.0.
I should stop ranting now while I have the chance. I do feel better though. :^)
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
> besides I am the only person in the whole world who recognizes that corporations are created to shirk personal responsibility
;-)
"Limited Liability Company"
Not that hard to recognize, is it?
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
The nazis did NOT believe in free markets. They, like the Marxists, were intent on shaking up the distribution of wealth. The primary difference being that the nazi's targeted the middle class (originally), and Marx the lower classes. And yes, they did turn control of industry and capital over to the state. Both depend on military (top down) regulation to make it a reality.
Both naziism and marxism advocate central planning. Capitalism is the exact opposite. Decisions are distributed. Capitalism doesn't demand that 'right' industries are subsidized, and that 'wrong' industries are taken apart. Marxism might be more planned than Naziism, but both believed that the state knows best. American capitalism doesn't make such value judgements (those few subsidies which we have aren't representive). It is free enterprise, plain and simple. It may setup some ground rules(eg: laws, intellectual property, antitrust laws, etc), but that is not the same thing is artificially allocating resources.
The failure of socialism/communism extends far beyond mere flaws in human nature. Its flaw is that it doesn't trust human nature, and thus is forced to relegate all decisions to a central authority. It assumes that centrally allocating resources is an acceptable substitute for free markets. Even if all people worked "hard" and where "honest", socialism would still fail. It really amazes me how few people still don't get it, especially on slashdot. You can populate your entire country with people as virtuous as mother theresa and still fail miserably.
Most americans, such as myself, believe that government and industry have seperate places. And hey, I'm an American. I believe in Seperation of Church and State. If you ever read our constitution you'd know that it is rather clear about it. The church has absolutely no role in our state. If anything, its a bit overboard. To the extent of NOT allowing students to even use school facilities for private church meeting. Most states, if not all, have similar statements in their constitutions.
Galileo wasn't a heretic,
Um, I'm not sure you're right about that. I think it would depend on whether Ptolmaic astronomy was actual doctrine, or just, like, strongly encouraged by the Church. Even if he wasn't, strictly defined, a heretic, he disagreed with the Church and got his ass kicked, for what it's worth.
He was a lousy example anyway, because my point was that even idiotic beliefs cannot reasonably be criminalized, and Galileo wasn't saying anything idiotic. Any number of well known heresiarchs would have done better, but I couldn't think of any that I was sure had been tortured and/or executed (in fact, the only name that comes to mind is Arius), and nobody on Slashdot would have heard of those guys anyway so I wouldn't have been communicating very effectively.
and the Inquisition didn't torture him.
They didn't? I could swear he was tortured by the Church, and since it was sometime around the Counter-Reformation, maybe I made a bad connection there. That's what I get for not looking it up.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
It ain't anything to do with the government, really. It was an advertising slogan whipped up by a marketroid at a flag company (no lie!) back in the 1940's or thereabouts. It caught on, and generations of schoolchildren have been taught to recite it (at an age far too young to understand the implications of taking an oath), but it's not in the Constitution or anything, and AFAIK it has no official existence at all. It's just sort of there, a blandly noxious little wad of 100% American cretinism lurking in the shadows of our national consciousness. It bothers me a lot less than Ed McMahon does, to be perfectly honest.
He was also wrong in assuming all atheists were communists
George Bush (pere) remarked, while in office, that he really didn't think that atheists could be considered patriots -- "or even citizens". Wow. The media, of course, gave him a free ride on that one, just like all the rest.
I missed that one, but one idiot yapping is relatively harmless. At least he didn't try to have Judaism criminalized . . . Which McCarthy's spiritual stepson Pat Buchanan would dearly love to do.
I have very left views. Honestly, it bothers me when ERS says things like he equates Marxism with Fascism. But I know some Political Science Professors who equate American Capitalism with Fascism.
I try to ignore ERS's politics. I focus on what he is an expert on. He has done a huge amount for the community. In his particular niche he is somewhat of a genius. Out side of it... I suspect he hasn't had broad enough exposure.
I'm not kidding. I'd completely forgotten writing that "librarian society" line. Damn, I like that one. It's funny. What that little outburst was supposed to mean, though, was that government is externally imposed on people at the same time as the human race was created [sic], rather than government having been created by the people themselves. This is as good an explanation as any for why, if libertarian government is so damn great, we don't have one already. (True, some relatively libertarian governments have existed here and there; Tahiti before it was "discovered" by Europeans seems to have been one such. But what worked back then in Tahiti can hardly be taken as a pefect model for the USA, now. Conditions are very, very different.)
Hmmm...(eyebrows raised)...
. . .
Boy, you're really lining them up and knocking them down, aren't you.
I dig it. I very much enjoy the patient, kind tone of your post, and your common sense as well. Thank you.
the data belongs to company that has it if they cant sell it to anybody or if the government make them not be able to get it THATS SOCIALISM AND ITS WRONG.
I don't understand this sentence
The general idea is that if somebody gathers data about you, it's their property and they can do as they please with it; it's theirs and it's none of your damn business. I've heard view put forward by real libertarians before. Of course, if the government does it, then it's pure evil, but if it's done by a limited liability corporation -- why then it's just fine! Let's raise our eyebrows together on that one . . . one, two, three . . . raise!
As near as I can tell, you are trying to say that privacy restrictions are under the realm of "protection for the greater good of society
Err, no. I was just trying to translate into idiotese the US "Conservative" notion that our freedoms are precious, but anybody who actually uses them (aside from owning guns) is some kinda commie or something. "Freedom should not be confused with license" is a direct quote from somebody, but I can't for the life of me remember who. Some wretched fundamentalist, probably.
This wasn't Marx's ultimate vision though.
He believed that the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would only be a necessary as an intermediate stage.
Ultimately it was to be a bit like Star Trek's universe of plenty. People would work, doing whatever they wanted to do, because it was what they wanted to do, not because it was what they had to. Rather than being 'alienated' from their work, they would be able to identify with it; and being happier, they would work more efficiently and take more pride in the quality of their craftsmanship.
This would make the plenty sustainable. There would be no shortages, so none would be denied according to their needs. Ultimately the state would just wither away, its functions superfluous.
Of course, it never happened.
But the resonance is undeniable with Linus's views on the freedom to enjoy open software for its own beauty, away from commercial considerations -- eg Q. "But why should people write this stuff ?" A. "Because it's fun!".
Really, it isn't so hard to see this as "software from each according to their coding abilities, to each according to their software needs"... and it remains to be seen whether free software will turn out to be any more competitive or sustainable than Marx's flawed vision of a communist utopia.
But I can't help smiling at the vehemence of ESR's denial, his internal desperation to try to repress the whole concept :-)
The best thing that we can do is IGNORE ESR!
It only took Europe 200 years to learn from the example of the United States that individual liberty is a good thing.
Actually, we got that idea from the English legal system, and from Enlightenment thinkers in France and Germany. Have you ever heard of the right of habeas corpus? It's an English invention. Have you ever wondered why there's so much Latin in legal terminology? Because we borrowed much of our law from legal systems whose roots date back to when Latin was the only written language in Europe. Greek was "rediscovered" by the West only during the Renaissance.
Also, our Constitution is a direct descendant of the Magna Carta, written centuries earlier. It was updated, of course, to conform to French thought in the 18th century. Which was almost over by the time we found out about it. Heh.
You are an ahistorical cretin. Learn to read before you shoot your mouth off. Why are all right-wingers so hopelessly ignorant? Heh. I'm asking the wrong question. It's the ignorance alone that allows them to take that simplistic bullshit seriously. Ignorance causes right-wingery. Well, that and a little native stupidity, I guess.
The scandinavian wellfare state isn't purely a socialdemocratic invention, in fact I think it has deep roots in the culture and government for hundreds of years. Read f.ex. Kierkegaard's critique of the danish state church. His main critique was that it had betrayed christianity by taking away the individual's decision and turned salvation into a government task. Of course, just like your libertarians, Kierkegaard was a rather paranoid and over the top.
Socialism is about solidarity (that's what a socialist told me), not about strong government or dictatorship or anything like that, in fact the socialists that I know tend to be rather antiestablishment and antiauthoritarian. Socialism means that the individual isn't allowed to race ahead and not have to worry about those who get left behind.
I remember once in gymclass, we we're going to play basketball and immediately we wanted to make 2 teams they way we usually did, by having 2 guys get up and start picking all the best players and the worst player ended up on the team that was one short (that was usually me, except when we had sports with another class where they had a retard, sometimes I got picked before him). When our socialist teachers saw it, they became completely incensed and wanted us to sit down in a circle and talk about it. It really bothered them that we divided ourselves up after ability instead of being all equal members of one group. I hated sports and always just wanted to get it over with, so it annoyed me that they made such a big deal out of it, but come to think of it, they actually saved me from one of my weekly humiliations so I guess socialism isn't all bad.
I don't know where you americans get all your ideas about Europeans and socialism from, but you're supposed to be the smart people in your country, the USA is in worse shape than I thought.
Got it?
Thanks.
In practice the Nazis gave very powerful "guidance" to firms.
In practice, IG Farben put Hitler in power, and profited enormously from it. It was a partnership. They cooperated.
In a country where the rule of law had been pushed to one side by the rule of force, individual property rights and private ownership weren't exactly insurmountable obstacles.
In a country where the support and connivance of the cartels was enormously valuable, it was worth Hitler's time to do a deal with them. And he did.
There's been some criticism of Raymond's incessant beating the the capitalist drum, and I think that's good. It should be noted that the Free Software movement, as started by RMS, is inherently anti-capitalistic (uh, the GPL is signed by "Ty Coon", "President of Vice", after all) and Raymond I think is really injecting his personal politics here. It doesn't work.
That said, this recent anti-Raymond paper really didn't offer any relevant criticism, ESR is right here. I didn't see anything of value in the work at all.
Some people are saying the Free Software movement is socialist, which I think is also an error (if one uses the term "socialist" as most american understand it). It is highly anarchistic, in the same tradition as thinkers like Rocker and Bakunin. It isn't even remotely socialist, let alone Marxist. I'm not saying RMS has anarchistic politcal roots, but if one is looking for a political parallel, it isn't in socialism or, of all things, capitalism.
Personally, I am rather tired of the arguments for "Open Source" based on "economy" and "practicality". Listen to RMS. It's about FREEDOM. RMS needs to crank it up.
support gun control: take guns from cops
This is the convenience of the OSS rhetoric: nobody has to take responsibility for what is said because everything is implied. Look at the video from Mad Dog, where he makes false claims (false as in no objective proof of the claim, not as in impossible) that Linux is more stable than NT. Why would he do this? To further his own goal of Linux dominating the world. So as you see, while this post may be uninformed, your's is simply blind follower worship of an obscure abstract idea that offers no evidence of your supposed informed opinion. At least this post doesn't claim to be informed, just an opinion.
Also, if the post was merely an "uninformed rebutal" and doing so is wrong, then why did you post an equally uninformed rebutal with absolutely no proof of your claims. The post you replied to never claimed to be a rebutal, yet yours does, but you do not hold your rebutal to the same standards that you demand from other rebutals.
This is the typical hypocrisy found in the OSS rehtoric. Examples of this are the demand that MS be destroyed because it is dominating the world, and then Linus calling for world domination. I thought world domination was wrong.
Also, the pattern of dictators creating followers does not have to be something said to be apparent. Linus does want to destroy MS, he does want Linux to have "world domination", and he has convinced his followers to fight against MS to further his own goal of world domination. This is so similar to how other dictatorships form that I'm surprised others don't notice it.
Yes, and Mussalini made the trains run on time.
fascism != socialism. Mussalini made the trains run on time with fear. ie. If the trains are late you'll be shot.
As far as the rest of your arguements go, they all seem to revolve around the idea that, because a socialist government provides so many services, there is an increased risk that a tryranical government will withhold those services based on some arbitrary "bias-du-jour". I would argue that the risk is no greater with socialist goverments than with any other goverments. So what do you advocate? Anarchy? That seems to be what you are driving at. With a well framed government with appropriate and working restrictions and checks and balances, your concerns should be minimized.
I think what it comes down to is that you don't trust government (a uniquely American view, I've found) and nothing anyone can say will change that. You think that tyranny is inherent in the government, and I think that tyranny is inherent in the great disparity between the "haves" and the "have nots". So I'm going to bow out of this particular arguement, and agree to disagree. It's been fun.
Cheers
Both naziism and marxism advocate central planning.
Read my post. What I said was accurate. You're radically oversimplifying, probably because you can't grasp anything terribly complex. But hey, that's not my problem, it's yours.
I believe in Seperation of Church and State. If you ever read our constitution you'd know that it is rather clear about it. The church has absolutely no role in our state.
I have read the Constitution. It's actually more vague on the subject than most people realize: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". What that means, such as it is, is that the "several states" can establish any damn official religion they want. I'm surprised that the whole federal-funding-makes-it-federal thing is still around; Renquist is quite fond of states' rights, but he's written a number of decisions based on the federal funding thing. He seems to be comfortable with it. Go figure.
So, yes, I have read the damn Constitution (and I've got a copy of it in front of me right now. Where's yours?). You, unfortunately, did not read my post. I said that most Americans oppose separation of church and state, and a majority of them do oppose it. They want the creation myth of their religion to be taught in public schools (more than 60% in most polls), and they want other peoples' kids to be forced to pray to their god in the public schools. Our dear morons in Congress want to force all the public schools to post, on the walls, a list of instructions for worshipping some random god or other. They believe that it will drive the devils out, as far as I can tell. It's absurd, it's pure superstition and madness, but Americans love that stuff.
They want a state religion. They'll get it, too, sooner or later, and to hell with the Constitution. Hell, if that's what they really want, the dumb bastards deserve it.
Get this through your head: The Constitution, in and of itself, permits nothing and forbids nothing. Unless people choose to enforce it, it is a piece of paper and nothing more. It is not natural law. It is not a physical force. It is just an agreement which people are free to ignore if they feel like it. They've ignored it in the past, and they'll ignore it again when the fit takes them.
But, tell me, what country in 1791 supported anything similar to the rights laid down in the US Constitution and it's First 10 Amendments, the Bill of Rights? Admitedly, there was the considerable hypocrisy of slavery, but that's been corrected. In 1791, there was no European country that had banned the practice of the slave trade, I believe.
The Magna Carta was an important step, of course, but that only constrained the sovereign to live under the rule of law. This established stability such that the regional rulers could consolidate their own holdings without fear of royal capriciousness. The US Constitution first established that the people were sovereign. An important historical event, I think.
Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire may have came up with the philosophical backdrop for Individual Liberty, but the Europeans at the time had a hard time implementing them. France in particular had a difficult time of things after first declaring themselves a republic for about 100 years of brutal repression and serial Governments.
Sure, it had precedent all the way back to the Laws of Hamurrabi, but what was started in the US was an important step forward that only now is being widely codified into law as basic human rights in Europe.
Watch out!! We communists are everywhere! We shall sneak into your house at night and sacrifice your children up to the pagan gods! Bwhahahaha! :-)
ESR, among others, has a bad habit of equating socialism with Stalinism. The word socialism shouldn't even be associated with Marxism at all. Marxists appropriated the word from the Anarchists. Socialism (Anarchism) is anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist. Go to www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931
for more...
. . . must, by definition, punish the innocent.
McCarthy was right.
He ran roughshod over the rights of criminals, and he was right to do it. Criminals are outlaws. They have rejected the laws of our society, so they have no right to demand the protection of those laws. He knew damn well who was guilty, just as the police do. The difference is that the police are now bound and gagged by decades of liberal laws passed by the Communists that got past McCarthy -- while McCarthy was free do cut the tumor out at the root without playing any games. Every time I look at how many liberals are running around loose in this country, I thank God that McCarthy was able to catch and destroy as many as he did. If it weren't for him, we'd be completely overrun. You and I would be in a Gulag now.
And of course, we both know just which instinctively motivated, hereditary criminals those liberal laws are intended to keep on the street, don't we? And I think we both know why. Some days it just makes me sick.
Aspects of this are dead on, some are off base, but ESR and the rest of us should learn from this document, as it contains the first sensible criticism of the OSS community EVER
Did you mean minutiae?
Oh, I love it.
Thank you.
And here's something most Americans find surprising (I sure did): Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, a man respected and often quoted by lovers of freedom everywhere for his cogent analysis of the mechanisms of oppression, opponent of totalitarianism and communism, was a socialist.
So, before we go whipping about all sorts of comparisons between Open Source and socialism, communism, and capitalism, maybe we should get it straight as to just what these things are. We're still suffering from McCarthyism and Cold War lies about forms of government.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The enforcement of EU laws in individual member states has yet to be tested. We'll see.
The UK has lost a number of cases in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
It had to change its laws every time.
From http://www.hri.org/docs/ECHR50.html :
The European Convention on Human Rights
ROME, 4 November 1950
ARTICLE 9
- Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.
- Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
ARTICLE 10- Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. this right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information an ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
- The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
ARTICLE 11Yes, a price that any rational person is willing to pay.
Based on the following statement from ESR: .... implacably hostile to all forms of Marxism and socialism (which I regard as coequal in evil with Naziism)."
"I am
I attempted to have a discourse with ESR about
his mis-perceptions about poltical systems.
I am an American that grew up in Europe and was
thus exposed to various systems.
His response was simply:
"So am I. I stand by my statement." That was in response to my statement about growing up in Europe.
I actually was honored to hear from such a
"notable", hell I use fetchmail all the time but
then I realized that he more or less said "
here I am and here I stand" w/o even being willing
to enter in any kind of debate. In Germany there
are people who have been friends for 20 years who
disagree furiously about politics but whose turn
is it to buy the beer? Anyway, I have learned that
I must re-evaluate this man in light of the fact that he has a problem with criticism.
I dont need another "my way or the highway" person.
Wrong. Linus never said he wanted to destroy Microsoft. And the "World Domination" thing is rather tongue in cheek (ha ha serious).
I don't understand why you feel the need to even be here saying things like that unless you have some deep seated loyalty to Microsoft.
Maybe they are the only ones who would give you the title "Engineer" without 4 long years of math and physics? >:^)
OK, the idea that open source is being pushed down people's throats has some basis--people scream about not getting the source even though the software is given away, like Corel's WP.
However, Sun *is* a potential threat to the open source ideal since it owns StarOffice and (albeit possibly paranoid) fears exist that Sun may just use StarOffice to convert users to StarPortal. Linus is right to push Sun toward open source. If you want to effect change, you have to push past the point you actually wish to achieve.
Oh, and call me a Linux evangelist all you like (Hallelueja -sp?- brother!) I fail to see how doors will be shut to idealistic, talented people with a penchant for generosity.
Enlighten me?
Yes, but that depends on how much control you have over the POP3 servers - they're for university students, and the admins aren't amenable to persuasion.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Like Nikolai B's article, this post is a fierce rebuttal to things that were never said. Contrary to what the AC above would have you believe, OSS does not promise a "utopia" that would happen "if only" everyone cooperated together. OSS merely embodies the idea that if a situation is arranged where it is in everyone's individual interests to make a cooperative project work, the results will often exceed the arrangement that the traditional closed-source process produces.
Now if you choose to disagree with that, then go ahead and disagree. But don't expect anyone to be taken seriously when you can't even accurately describe the ideas you claim to be rebutting. Anyone who can claim that ESR, RMS and Linus represent a single monolithic ideology is hardly as expert on the matter as they think they are.
Regarding Naziism vs Marxism, my point still stands. They both have alot more in common with each other than Capitalism and Naziism do. Capitalism believes in free and open markets, the others are polar opposites insofar as they believe in central structure, redistribution, and "guidance". If you can't comprehend this most fundamental difference, then you are hopeless.
You tell me what exactly it is that Congress has done to advocate any particular religion. I understand Federalism just fine. In fact, if you read my comment you would have also seen that I said _most_ states also have state constitutions to that effect. I really doubt that we'll see the theory of evolution, and the like, cast out of our schools on a large scale. At the very most, it'll become an elective. Which I personally don't have that much of a problem with.
What polls are you referring to? There is a saying: There are three kinds of lies in this world: lies, damn lies, and statistics. I'm suspicious of most polls. Just because one is religious doesn't mean one must be against Darwin. Even the Catholic church is not so clear about it.
You see the world as black and white. You believe: If the people want it and there has been any error what so ever in the application and enforcement of the constitution, then it must happen (the constitution be damned). THAT is over simplification if I ever heard it (assuming even your premise is right). To accept this belief of yours, one must ignore history. What about the civil rights moment (not to mention many others). Many of these issues were unpopular with the vast majority of Americans at the time. The constitution obviously was not uniformly enforcing civil rights prior. Yet many advances in civil rights were made none the less.
While the constitution may be a mere piece of paper, it has withstood the popular vote before. If Congress were to suddenly mandate that all schools convert to Methodism, this would clearly violate the first amendment. I know it wouldn't stand. There is really no way to 'prove' that this will or won't happen. You simply need an intuitive feel. Unfortunately, people such as yourself are hopeless.
If you wish to believe this rubbish, then do so. But don't think that getting loud and offensive is a substitute for one's own intuitition and reasoning. Hopefully in a few years, you'll see that your vision never came to fruition and you'll grow up a little.
. . . and the only self-described Marxist I know also calls himself an anarchist. He's dead serious on both counts. I happen to think he's kidding himself, but Marxist anarchy is no more ridiculous or impractical than free-market anarchy: Anarchy in general is a short road to totalitarianism, and that's that. It really doesn't matter whether people share the potatoes or not.
. . . if one is looking for a political parallel, it isn't in socialism . .
"Socialism", "capitalism", and a "free market" are three different ideas about how to structure an economy. They're not political systems. The system in the Soviet Union was, quite accurately, described by its architects as "state capitalism". Capital is surplus wealth, that's all. They decided to hand theirs over to the government. When they decided not to let people vote, then they were getting into politics. (But bear in mind that Russia under the czars differed from Russia under the Soviets in very few ways -- the only really signficant one being that the Soviets succeeded in industrializing (albeit at a horrible cost) a country which the previous system had kept trapped in the Middle Ages. Nobody got to vote much before 1917, either. Mainly they just changed the titles of the guys in charge. And for all we know, the czars would have industrialized the place anyway, had they been given a chance.)
By contrast, "anarchism" is a political system (if you can call it a "system"
As an American, I realize that we've all been fed horse-doctor's doses of propaganda which denies all of the above, but it's just propaganda and you shouldn't take it too seriously.
Personally, I am rather tired of the arguments for "Open Source" based on "economy" and "practicality". Listen to RMS. It's about FREEDOM.
Sing it, brother. That's where it's at. I couldn't agree more. The yap about socialism and capitalism is just a red herring anyway.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Jordan Henderson writes:
"Sure, there's rationing that occurs because of scarcity that also determines who lives or dies, but I prefer this kind of 'natural' rationing (natural because we observe it in nature) over allowing some tyrant this power"
How is the -- utterly UN-natural, BTW -- "rationing" of life, health, and freedom exclusively to those with the greenbacks to pay for it any less tyrannical?
Christian R. Conrad
MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.
Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here
All this talk about linux distribution (or any OS) destroying the movement is silly. Examples of fragmentation that has survived: *religion - jewdasim -> christanity -> all 500 sects *politics/government - communism -> socialism - democracy -> conservative/liberal/other *commerical software - Unix -> commerical sects - Windows -> win 9x/winnt API differences - File formats -> ANSI, .doc, ect * all consumer products - automobiles -> take different parts - coffee makers -> different size filters ect, ect. The idea that OSS is immune to fragmentation is absurd. However, when one "sect" can view changes by another "sect", this ensures that they have the ability (they also pointing at the users) to provide compatability and "mend" this fragmentation. - Awe
1746. Slavery abolished in Swedish colonies
1772. Slavery declared to have no legal status in England, and therefore to be unenforceable there ("Lord Mansfield's judgment")
1791. Slavery abolished in French colonies.
1801. Slavery restored by Napoleon, excluding Haiti; slavery in French colonies finally abolished 1848
1807 UK, 1808 USA, 1815 France: Capture of African prisoners for slavery prohibited
1833. Slavery abolished in British colonies.
1848. Slavery abolished in Danish colonies.
1860. Slavery abolished in Dutch colonies.
1865. Slavery abolished in USA.
The minute the Bezroukov article was mentioned here, I knew ESR would come up with a rebuttal like he did. And I guess we all knew what he would say - that he is right and the other guy is wrong.
ESR is just too predictable. Just like RMS. (Now if *this* sentence receives attention by either ESR or RMS, I know how vehemently each will deny it too).
Sreeram.
If you look at the income statistics, 1970-1999, you'll see that approximately 50% of the boats haven't floated, and the smallest boats have actually sunk.
Which is exactly what I had said, that the slave trade was still permitted by all European countries, that ever participated in it, in 1791. While European countries may have abolished the practice of slavery earlier than the US, they were still profiting from the slave trade for some time. Seems like Europe doesn't have much to be proud of in this regard.
actually it would be more accurate to say that they believed in an enterprise owned state
m.
Did you mean minutiae? ;)
And you know what? Taxes are higher here in California than in the UK... but I've lost my freedom to get free medical care when I'm sick.
You mean that doctors in the US have the freedom to charge for their services? Remember that medical care is a business, just like computer programming. You can't claim society is free if your need imposes an obligation on someone else to cover your medical expenses. The person paying for the expenses loses their freedom.
California is a grossly repressive state. And what makes it sick is that the state population accepts the status quo, or tries to remove even more freedoms.
But I wouldn't jump in joy over Europe's supposed freedoms. Try to start a business in Europe. You need permits, which sometimes require 50+ years (like selling alcohol), and then you have to submit to arbitrary employee "protection" laws, which starve your business of money and man power (such as limits on the number of hours permitted to work in a day/week).
Despite the flaws in Nikolai's argument, his analysis of the flaws in ESR's OSS rhetoric and the similarities with Marxism are accurate (IMHO). Nikolai's proof may not be that well thought out, but he's on the right track. The similarities between OSS rhetoric and Maxist rhetoric are very apparent. Marxism: The basic idea that if everyone cooperated and worked together, society will progress toward a utopia. OSS: The basic idea that if everyone just cooperated and worked together, software development would progress toward a utopia. I find the notion that any individual stating they are able to predict the future actions of any complex system (society, evolution, software trends) is rediculous. My only fear with OSS, is that the primary leaders/dictators of the movement act very much like previous dictators in history. The pattern goes something like: Find followers, create enemy, convince followers to kill enemy for your cause. So I see OSS actually removing MY freedom to produce software however I damn well please and charge as much as I can without giving source out. RMS, ESR and Linus Torvalds seem to want force everyone to use the GNU model. But, the GNU model isn't freedom because it restricts my choice (I can't chose what I want to do with my source). Pretty scary if you ask me. I always wonder what would happen if these three had their way, and Microsoft was gone and the industry had to work the way they dictated. Well, I'd stop being a programmer, that's for sure. Now, take a look at all the followers on slashdot just taking the crap ESR, RMS, and Linus crank down without even questioning it. Look at the hate e-mail and the posts on this very message that show the true nature of the Linux Zealot. And ask yourself, do you want these nuts ruling the software world? Looks like another bloody revolution my comrades. See you in Antarctica.
.....someone, tell me that this is a joke.
if(! strcmp(opensource,"communism"))
Umm, I don't think you want that ! there. You don't want to change it if opensource already equals communism!
{
delete opensource;
opensource = new char[11];
strncpy("communism",opensource,10);
}
Okay, so you're deleting the old opensource string, allocating a new 11-byte string off the free store, then copying the first 10 bytes into the constant string "communism". I'm sure the compiler will have a field day with that. ;)
else
Nathanprintf("opensource looks fine - %s hasn't gotten to it yet.", DEITY);
You have exactly defined why Socialism is a repressive system, and don't even realize it: "leaving aside personal greed". In the United States, literally anyone who works hard can become independantly wealthy. Sadly, in most European countries that is not true (although it happens, rarely). But what's amazing is that apologists such as yourself think that's a *good* thing! No one should be able to rise above anyone else... everyone should stay at the same level of mediocrity (except for the people in control, of course).
Or haven't you noticed the huge disparity between the number of people who want to come to the US, versus the number of people who want to leave?
One of the fundamental flaws of the socialist mentality is that you equate desire for a better life through money == greed. They are not the same. The pie is not limited.
This isn't surprising behaviour from ESR.
;)
I looked at it from a purely academic standpoint. Very strong solid arguments, that added a lot to the paper.
I looked at it from a personal standpoint, and saw the same thing.
I looked at it from ESR's standpoint and saw a challenge to my 'undeniable knowledge' about open source, and my media supremacy as ESR.
To put it bluntly, ESR is very egotistical and overly optimistic, assuming that if he says it, it will not only happen, but become law. This simply isn't true. I have analyzed much of what ESR has said throughout his 'reign' and have found most of it to be obviously written by an egotistical, overly boastful, angry zealot. Maybe ESR's just angry because RMS has held the spotlight for so long, and he wants a piece of the pie. Maybe it's because somebody wrote a critique that he views as a personal insult.
Either way, this is equivalent to a child's comeback. I say "you suck," ESR says "yeah, well you suck more!" We know for certain that at least one side is mature enough, hopefully, to simply say "whatever" and walk away before it becomes some ugly debacle.
ESR and Bruce Perens didn't get along with eachother for a reason. I'll save them both the embarassment of bringing those details back out into the light again, and leave it at that ESR is totally uncompromising unless it's going to further him personally, from what I have seen and heard.
People can flame me all they want, but the fact of the matter stands that ESR would probably slap the 'Open Source Certified' sticker on any product who's maker paid him off personally, under the table. He's the equivalent of a televangelist in my eyes; "can I get a hallelujiah!?" 'HALLELUJIAH!' "Can I get your credit card number?!" '4129...'
ESR makes strong points, but only politically. I've yet to see a 100% objective and reasonable writing from ESR. He has a habit of dodging the tough questions, of dodging things that could get him in trouble, of running away when he's scared of something small. In all the years I've known the brash, opinionated, certainly egotistical, and sometimes downright insane RMS, he has maintained a fair level of professionalism. ESR's level of professionalism varies wildly from paper to paper, word to word. At times he reminds me of a coworker at a former job who was recently fired for gross unprofessionalism. When it suited him, he'd be the penultimate professional idiot; always had an answer, and always said sir. But when it didn't, he'd curse up a storm, get personal, and get impolite and downright unpleasant.
I never chose ESR to represent me, or my views, or the Linux community. Who did? I don't recall anyone of any real import beyond business people with 'open source' software actually endorsing him, but I honestly haven't paid any attention. The fact of the matter remains; I'd rather ESR didn't attempt to mis-represent any community I consider myself a part of, but he's going to keep right on doing it, so long as people hail him as their saviour.
Don't get me wrong; I'd rather not have RMS representing me professionally either. RMS is a hardliner who actually gives a damn about his morals and won't compromise his views, except to extremes. (I'm sorry, but if I *ever* have to listen to 'Join us now and share the software' again I'm gonig to have to rip off RMS' lips.
ESR's behaviour, conduct, and words have turned the term 'open source' from a very meaningful term into a pair of words that just means you let people see the undocumented features and ESR slaps his personal seal of approval on it.
Means nothing to me. Honestly, I'm fairly indifferent about GPL vs LGPL vs 'Open Source' vs Commercial. I concern myself only with whether or not it gets the job done first, then I consider the possibilities later. As anyone in any IT field with half a clue would. Functionality should always come before whether or not it's "free" software by anyone's definition.
In closing, all I can say is that I'm wholly and totally displeased with the conduct and quality of work ESR has done. All he has done has create meaningless terms, poor relationships, and damaged the credibility of an entire community at times, in my opinion. Maybe he should take a hint, and start acting a great deal more professionally and less 'geeky.'
/* This is my opinion, these are my words. I'd say 'em again in a heartbeat. And quite frankly, I don't give a damn if it ticks you off. It's an opinion, and they're like assholes - everyone's got one. So deal. */
-RISCy Business | Rabid unix guy, networking guru
your company here.
shelby != ford
And when he said it, it was thoroughly tongue-in-cheek.
Socialism isn't Commnunism, and Communism isn't marxism. Furthermore, socialism isn't marxism. ESR's view on socialism, marxism, etc. is WAY too extreme. The terms "marxist" and "socialist" are used regularly in the academic world to describe things that have NOTHING to do with Communist governments.
.no folks want to comment on this, I'd enjoy reading their posts.
If I understand correctly, socialism is much like the Norwegian system. People view themselves as members of a community, and they make policy accordingly. And from what I understand, it seems to be reasonably effective. If any
So, is the Norwegian government as evil as the Nazi Germany? ESR seems to think so. And if he denies it, then his original statement suffers from the same pretentious and simplistic flaws that infest "The Cathedral and the Bazzar".
Libertarianism is, in my view, just as dangerous as communism is. There was a time when America was free of "big government" and stupid regulations. it was the late 19th century, when American cities were extremely corrupt and machine rule was commonplace. Businesses essentially compelled children to work to work for peanuts. Grown men worked for slightly more. And the term "peanuts" is actually far too generous here. The average American lived in squalid poverty while greedy businesses and crooked politicians exploited their misfortune.
Big Government restricts what we can do, but it also protects us from our own apathy, greed, and ignorance. Would we even have computers and the Internet without a federally funded university system? How many of you attend/attended college on federal Stafford loans?
The libertarians want to have their cake and eat it too. They grew up and live in a time of unprecidented prosperity, but they can't leave well enough alone. They want the benefits and security that government provides, but they don't want taxes and restrictions.
Government should not be trusted. We should always scrutinize what the government does, and we should not delude ourselves into ignoring it's faults. But we must look before we leap, and we must balance social responsibility with the preservation of personal autonomy. ESR's libertarianism is just plain irresponsible.
Sorry for spelling poorly. And I'm sorry for writing such a long post and for inevitably irritating some people. Some things just piss you off and you've gotta tell someone about it.
Take care,
Steve
"pride goes before a fall"
.. and other witty sayings eric has never paid attention to before.
The point is not whether or not you agree with ESR's politics. Being a libertarian he has views about socialism that probably don't match most of yours, and you know what, I don't care.
The POINT is that what's-his-name's rebuttal hinges on the fact that ESR is some kind of socialist (I read the rebuttal and I don't remember that being the point though), at least according to ESR, and he is trying to set the record straight on what his position is.
ESR did not bother to discuss the rest of what's-his-name's paper because it was not really about cathedral and the bazarre anyway.
What right do you have to say that ESR can't be anti-communist anyway? WHO CARES?
How is it that something which is illegal for one person to do (e.g. a non-voluntary transfer of money) becomes legal when the "community" does it?
Businesses essentially compelled children to work to work for peanuts.
First, children have always worked. Second, add up the hours that children work in school, and after school on homework. Ten- to twelve-hour days are commonplace.
The average American lived in squalid poverty while greedy businesses and crooked politicians exploited their misfortune.
The average American lived in squalid poverty before the businesses came along. How can they be said to have caused that poverty?
They want the benefits and security that government provides, but they don't want taxes any restrictions.
If you ask Libertarians, they'll tell you that they don't want the benefits and security that government provides either. Such benefits and security always come at a price.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
While I don't agree with all of ESR's views(BeOS, etc), and I don't espouse libertarian notions, I respect him. He's provided some of the most intelligent and honest commentary on the virtues of Open Source software. He does this from a rational point of view, not with emotional plees that propietary software is immoral. Futhermore, he's got balls and he doesn't mince words.
I'd far rather have someone who says what needs to be said and steps on toes in the process, than someone who says whatever his 'people' want to hear. eg: Bill Clinton, Perens, etc.
Socialism by definition mandates that property and wealth are redistributed to the people/state. Communism may impliment it a bit differently, but in either case its naive, offensive, and just plain stupid. The nazis, too, believed in state owned enterprise. In fact, if you examine the facts a little closer you'd discover that Marxism and Naziism have a great deal in common. A fascist dictatorship is not required to draw such parallels.
Regarding socialist Europe, many would argue that it is the socialist policies that have weakened it. Take France's labor laws, for example, it is virtually impossible to fire someone. As a result it makes employeers (particularly small employeers) rethink any hiring decisions...its just too much of a liability.
I think it's extremely unfortunate that Nikolai Bezroukov permeated his essay with political labelling laced with so much historical baggage that it was bound to cause from ESR a knee-jerk defensive reaction permeated with an equal and opposite amount of irrelevance. And it did.
It's unfortunate not because it caused aggravation in the community (we thrive on that), but because there were quite a few real points dotted around in Nikolai's article which could usefully have been presented as a well reasoned critique of CatB, but as a result of the political red herrings the opportunity to do so has been lost, at least to Nikolai. All it's done it to make ESR hopping mad and to provoke the standard response of the stereotypical indignant American accused of anything sounding vaguely non-capitalistic. Needless to say, it was not productive.
Political and sociological analogies of that sort are just *analogies*, not anything real. Even when the forms are totally congruent, the referrents are always utterly different and so the end result ranges from questionable to ridiculous. It's not meaningful, and it's certainly not helpful.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
There is the seen -- the dead people produced by Nazism -- and the unseen -- the lack of wealth and opportunity produced by socialism.
I am saying that I would rather lack wealth than be worked within an inch of death, and then gassed. Now that I've seen a few posts claiming that those two fates are, after all, identical, it has ocurred to me that those who were sent to concentration camps by the Nazis were robbed blind beforehand. That seems like a relatively trivial matter, but if "wealth" is worth as much to you as human life, there it is. They took that, too.
I will also aver that most other people feel the same way I do, and I will finally assert that mainstream Western morality is predicated on the assumption that human life is worth more than property. That assumption may be dead wrong, but it's gotten us this far at least. The Soviets, by valuing property (be it public or private) more than human life, didn't get much of anywhere.
As so often happens, you are not seeing what is not there, and then thinking that its absence is of no matter.
Well, "absence" is a darn tough thing to quantify, you know, and the unpleasant fact of the matter is that most of the wealthiest nations in the world have at least partially socialist economies. Look at most of Europe, for example.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
One of the ironies of this whole open source "debate" is that the point of free software, open source, et al is that it's supposed to be "free" -- free of restrictions, encumberments, and so on. I guess I thought that also meant free of "open source" political litmus tests.
Apparently not. It seems that someone has to self-appoint themself as standard-setter for what free software really is. So long as you are creating and submiting to an authority, even one that's setup to promote freedom, I think you're invalidating the concept of freedom.
Which is why I don't get the big debate -- if the source is available, and I can reuse it in pretty much any way I want, isn't that kind of the end of the debate?
And what happens the next day when that same person is hungry again, and the other guy doesn't have a TV? That's the fallacy of socialism and why these seemingly simple ideas always fail.
On the other hand, if we don't feed this theoretical hungry person (assuming they are able bodied), hunger will eventually overcome their lazyness and they will get a job and feed themselves. He then can feed himself every day, and the first guy still has his TV.
"Tough love" is true compassion, because it has as its goal dignity. Stealing from someone else is false compassion, because it solves nothing.
Like Communism, you can have any choice so longs as its ESR's choice
You'd think that subject is self-obvious, but it doesn't seem to be.
Currently there is a very diverse group of people leading the (I have no good way to lump these without offending somebody) open source/free software movement. That's a good thing. It means they balance out each others opinions. No one knows precisely why open source/free software succeeds. Any one leader is probably at least partially wrong.
On the other hand the constant fighting is a real problem. It doesn't come across well to the mainstream world when our leaders keep acting like children. It's particularly sad to me since I like (I suspect) many people respect them all, and hate to see them make fools of themselves.
I disagree with many of ESR's comments about RMS because I symathize with RMS's position. He's devoted himself completely to a movement that as it came to fruitation (in his eyes) abandoned him. When he tried to remind people of what he had contributed (don't try to villanize this - everyone wants credit, particularly when they've worked hard) he was rejected more and more. Now he gets to read comments like "The Free Software Foundation has been a millstone around our necks." I consider that unbelievably cruel. Do I entirely agree with RMS? No. But I think he should be respected for his contributions, and instead I often see my friends mock him.
In contrast, I also understand ESR's problems with RMS. Alienating companies is a bad idea. At least for now while the movement is still growing things like Mozilla need to be encouraged. And while KDE is not perfect it's a very nice desktop, particularly for newbies, and QT's license will not destroy the free software movement. It may not help it tremendously, but when windows users who are afraid of UNIX see KDE their eyes light up. That advances open source/free software tremendously. If GNOME turns into as good a desktop, with better licesing that's great too, and all the better for being entirely free, but the KDE developers should certainly not be condemed.
I hesitate to even mention Bruce and ESR. I will anyway because I think it's very important, but I'll ask you both not to respond if all you plan to say is "he started it" or "I'm not going to forgive him" or "he's not cooperating". Again, criticism is fine, but insults don't help anything. I think open criticism of events in the open source/free software community is very important, but it needs to be done with consideration for everyone else invovled, and the recognition that no one is intentionally trying to harm the movement. And it needs to be accepted gracefully. Which is never easy to do. But a responce that says I disagree, here's why, without also coming across as trying to discredit the author is the only thing likely to lead to intelligent discussion, rather than flame wars. The thing that really bothers me about the entire incident with the Apple licence is that it has to have left Apple with a bad taste in their mouth. A calmer responce from Bruce, then answered without anger by Eric would probably not have lead to this.
Basically this (now ridiculously long) ramble amounts to: if you're going to lead make sure you recognize that the open source/free software movement is a diverse group (heck, I can't even think of a name for it that doesn't offend somebody) with diverse leaders. Who are all trying to do what is best. And who are all human. And who all have tempers. If everyone involved would respect these facts, and each other, we'd make a lot better impression on the outside world.
P.S.: And the words "I'm sorry", while never pleasant, haven't been known to kill anyone, and usually lead to a similar responce.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
sklein
And it would do us all a lot of good to recognize that. We keep talking about them as though they don't really exist, and our words can't hurt them. That's not true, they read and comment on these postings too. And even if you feel that someone is egotistical, you probably wouldn't say it to their face, in public, in front of 50 people. Which is exactly what's happening here.
Just an observation.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
We have in this thread a huge number of people either failing or refusing to address the point.
Raymond's objection was that Bezroukov's essay went out of its way to caricature and misrepresent his writings. He cited particulars where this was obviously the case. The second-level comments here, ironically, ignore the point even more than Bezroukov's did.
People: The question was whether Bezroukov's comments were relevant and reasonable. Your views on Raymond's politics, his ego, his essays, his pronouncements on the term "GNU/Linux", his skills at diplomacy or lack thereof, his abilities as a "leader", or alleged unwillingness to admit himself wrong, and sundry personal qualities have nothing whatsoever to do with the question at hand.
One or two posters made the almost-relevant remark that Raymond relies on works other than "TCatB" to make most of his points. That might have been a valid objection, except that Bezroukov's essay concerned those other works, too. I quote (emphasis added): "Starting with his famous paper "Cathedral and Bazaar" Eric Raymond published a series of articles (see especially his comments on the so-called Halloween documents) he promoted an overoptimistic and simplistic view of open source, as a variant of socialist (or, to be more exact, vulgar Marxist) interpretation of software development."
Bezroukov addressed this remark explicitly to Raymond's entire body of essays on open source. It is explicitly stated up-top as the thesis of his paper.
Critical commentary should be evaluated for accuracy and relevance on its internal merits. That is the proper standard for everything, there: Bezroukov's piece, Raymond's reply, and you people's alleged commentary on Raymond's reply. The commentary here has been consistently off in Cloud-Cuckooland -- which explains in part how you could possibly fail to notice that Bezroukov wrote nothing better than an extended straw-man argument.
You can do better, people. At least I bloody well hope so.
As always Mr fetchmail has no arguments, I'd like a real opensource author to get his place. If a minor package like fetchmail is enough to extrapolate linux future I wonder where we all would be now if a real opensource like sendmail had been the basis for that futil text. IN the real world we have two bill's: bill joy of vi, pascal, vm fame and bill gates of 'basic' fame. In the virtual world of 'opensource' wh have two Eric's: that one from sendmail, a real opensource and this slashdot promoted one of fetchmail. It is no coincidence Raymond is supported by ora.com, that "opensource" site that exclusively uses NT or Solaris on their server, go to netcratft and check.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
There is the seen -- the dead people produced by Nazism -- and the unseen -- the lack of wealth and opportunity produced by socialism. As so often happens, you are not seeing what is not there, and then thinking that its absence is of no matter.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Well said. Based on what I see being posted, I'd say a lot of posters here would eat the menu and leave the meal.
PeeWee
Someone please moderate this guy's posts up -- they're about twice as insightful and well-written as 90-95% of the stuff that gets posted here (and often up-moderated), yet he only has a karma of 11. I want a new button that lets me give karma points to someone else :) [ yes, it's called 'moderation', but I seem to be banned from moderating. Dunno why, I only ever had time to moderate one or two posts, hardly enough of a sample to be marked an abuser ]
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
We're still suffering from McCarthyism and Cold War lies about forms of government.
But Hollywood *was* infested by communists. McCarthy was right.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
. . . once wrote that all authors wish themselves to be judged by what they intend to write, but they judge others by what the others have written.
But of course, Borges is one of those nasty foreigners, so what does he know?
In other news, I read a few months back that the English were all ticked off because the French refused to import the brown glop that the English call "chocolate". This is becaue, in France, it's legal to sell sugared vegetable-oil byproducts, but not if you falsely label the stuff as "chocolate". In the US, we proudly consume many tons of brown-colored vegetable-oil byproduct crap every day, and we call it "chocolate", and we're fat, dumb, and happy. Hurrah! Hurrah! We're Number One!
a group of people who don't know any better than to not take bad medicine (because they have to be told what medicine is good for them by the gov't)
I take it that you have the time and resources to conduct extensive clinical trials on everything (or, for that matter, anything) that you contemplate ingesting? I admire that. I can only assume that you tested the crack you're smoking, and found it good. Hurrah! We are, once again, Number One!
Yes, respect has to be earned, but ESR's knee-JERK reaction to a well thought out critique shows yet again that ESR cannot tollerate critism at all.
No more proof is needed: ESR's worried that his EGO may not be fed for much longer.
How is it that something which is illegal for one person to do (e.g. a non-voluntary transfer of money) becomes legal when the "community" does it?
Yeah, well, welcome to society. Much as we'd all love to play idiotic semantics games with you, I think even you realize that this is an absurd argument.
First, children have always worked. Second, add up the hours that children work in school, and after school on homework. Ten- to twelve-hour days are commonplace.
Wow, I sure hope you aren't seriously arguing that hours spent in school equate to hours spent milling textiles, especially for children. If you are, you're less intelligent than I was already inclined to believe.
The average American lived in squalid poverty before the businesses came along. How can they be said to have caused that poverty?
Not a student of history, are you? Dig on "industrial revolution" and "gilded age".
If you ask Libertarians, they'll tell you that they don't want the benefits and security that government provides either. Such benefits and security always come at a price.
Sounds like a bunch of foolhardy anarchists to me. Anarchy's been seen (Somalia comes to mind). It doesn't work out real well. The benefits and security provided by government far outweigh the taxes and regulations most libertarians live under. God forbid you should have to live only comfortably instead of luxuriously because someone wants to build a road or school a child. Last I checked, they were a bunch of whiny jerks bent on reneging on any sort of social responsibility. And if it WERE every man for himself, the libertarians would probably be the first flushed out of the gene pool.
Hear hear, for the venomous louse. I'm glad to see some opinions (especially progressive ones) other than the simplistic libertarian orthodoxy which is prevalent in the technical world. I'm always amazed at how many technically expert and otherwise brilliant people hold such politically unsophisticated and immature views. It's as if they've lost their ability to think when it comes to politics. Reminds me of Ross Perot supporters who don't want to hear anything that doesn't follow their leader's line.
Go out and see a movie folks. You poeple are obsessed with minutae.
our radically socialist president,
I'm really getting sick of the infantile bullshit that you people spew out. I'm sorry, but the Big Lie was wrong when Hitler used it, and it's wrong now when you use it.
Clinton is not a socialist. At all. Period. And he's not a "radical" anything. I known you don't give a damn about the truth, but there it is. Take it or leave it. Just because you don't like him, doesn't mean you get to make up fantasies about him and pretend that they're true.
I fear for the future.
With people like you running around loose, I fear as well. The right wing in America has gotten to the point where they think that they can invent stories off the top of their heads and choose to believe them -- and that this "will to believe" will make those stories true. It's a radical rejection of the rationalistic worldview that we've been going along with for the past few centuries, and no good will come of it.
Another example is the fate of Scientology in Germany. As despicable as I find Scientology to be, illegalizing a religion is a degree of governmental intrusion into people's lives that Americans simply would not accept
Again, you're making up fantasies here. German law now recognizes the fact that Scientology functions primarily as a racketeering organization. It's illegal to engage in racketeering. It is NOT illegal to belong to a "criminal organization" -- as long as you don't commit any crimes. When you commit a crime, then you are a criminal. Crimes are illegal. Too subtle for you? I thought so.
I don't know what you think of as a prosperous economy, but what they've got in Europe now ain't it.
Another barefaced lie. You have absolutely no idea what the economies in Europe are like. Here's a hint: Most are extremely successful.
And the potential of, and the mechanisms for, a totalitarian regime are built into those societies. I find this unacceptable, even if that potential is not at this time being fulfilled.
An identical potential is built into our society. It's called "original sin". Deal with it. As for the mechanisms, you're making up stories again.
As far as the USSR goes, it was communist only in rhetoric. In practice, as well as in name, it was firmly socialist.
Look, I assume you're getting your definitions of "communist" and "socialist" from CBN or the NRA or something, but you have to bear in mind that the rest of us aren't trapped in your ideological bunker, and we tend to use the normal, accepted definitions of words like that. The distinction you're making here is pure, unadulterated gibberish. Please explain what you're trying to communicate with the words "communist" and "socialist". From what I've seen so far, I'd give damn poor odds that your assertion will make any sense even when it's translated into English, but at least it'll have a fighting chance.
while its methods were far more draconian than those currently employed in Europe, those methods are not in principle beyond the reach of those governments.
"In principle"? What are you babbling about? You're blowing a lot of smoke, but it's just smoke.
The GNU/Linux development model looks like that to me. Not to you?
No, because you do not go far enough in describing socialism.
He said that OSS development resembles socialism in certain, well-defined ways. He listed those ways. He is undeniably correct. He did not say that OSS was identical, from top to bottom, to any given example of a socialist economy, in practice or in theory, nor did he say anything at all about governments. What do you mean, he "didn't go far enough"? Nonsense. You're changing the subject. I could say that dogs and cats both have ears, and you might "prove me wrong" by observing that dogs are omnivores, while cats are pure carnivores. Well, that's an interesting little fact there (and it happens to be true, by the way, at least in nature), but you haven't even attempted to address my point about the ears, now have you? Yeah, yeah, cats and dogs are different animals. Fine, whatever. Who cares? That's beside the point! All I'm saying is that they both have ears.
He's right, and you're grasping at straws, just because you've been indoctrinated to bark at the word "socialism". Get over it. You're not impressing me with how well trained you are. Dogs can be trained. People are supposed to think.
And, yes, dogs and people both have ears, but that doesn't mean they have to be identical in all respects.
I think that the core of my argument is solid and well thought-out. Let me respond to some of your remarks.
"How is it that something which is illegal for one person to do (e.g. a non-voluntary transfer of money) becomes legal when the "community" does it?"
I suppose you mean taxes. Taxes are necessary to support a government. Government is necessary to maintain civilization. And civilization sure beats scrounging around the forest for berries and shit. Those are your only two choices. Life's a bitch.
"First, children have always worked. Second, add up the hours that children work in school, and after school on homework. Ten- to twelve-hour days are commonplace."
But not in coal mines and factories. And coal mines and factories were infinitely worse than they are now, because there was no such thing as OSHA.
The average American lived in squalid poverty before the businesses came along. How can they be said to have caused that poverty?
They made it much, much worse and did nothing to make it better, even though they had the power to do so. You should read up on urban life during the industrial revolution. Be sure to include a book called "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair in your studies.
If you ask Libertarians, they'll tell you that they don't want the benefits and security that government provides either. Such benefits and security always come at a price.
What they say they want doesn't always represent what they really want. In the United States, we live in a time of immense wealth and unprecidented prosperity. It's easy to take it for granted. In fact, I think it is almost impossible NOT to take it for granted at some level. I don't believe that libertarians consciously understand the extent to which our government provides the stability and security that serve as the foundation for this prosperity.
I can write much, much, more if necessary, but I hope this helps to clarify my thinking.
Take care,
Steve
Has anyone else noticed that the following statement from ESR's response article:
Regardless of whether I agree or disagree with ESR's political beliefs, I find it questionable that ESR has any business taking umbrage at the notion of questioning those beliefs. He has made a point of injecting those beliefs into his discussions of open source, and he is acting as a representative for this community.
Personally, I think that makes criticisms of the consistancy, logical foundation, and appropriateness of his politics fair game in this discussion.
And ESR bored me to death. How did that man get anywhere in the first place?
Here in California there's a law that stops me walking down the street carrying an uncovered bottle of wine. There's another law that stops me crossing the road, except at a crosswalk. There's another law that stops my friends smoking in a bar with me.
And you know what? Taxes are higher here in California than in the UK... but I've lost my freedom to get free medical care when I'm sick.
In contrast to the nanny-state here in the US, Europe is a libertarian's paradise. The "free USA" and the "repressed" Europe sound like they exist in your imagination - the facts don't fit.
- a happy, "repressed" European :-)
Well, I respect ESR's move towards opening up the computer industry, etc., but I must say that I lost nearly all my respect for him after his fascist little slur that Kevin Mitnick deserved to be in prison.
This just furthers the cause. To debunk the paper by saying that Bezroukov's extensive and well-thought-out essay "adds nothing new" is quite an ignorant statment. I agree with most of the comments I've seen in here that ESR has become too political for his position.
You're a brilliant computer scientist, ESR, but let's keep it to that and keep your little pro-McCarthyist opinions to yourself.
Um... Fetchmail is usually used in conjunction with sendmail and procmail to do fancy things with you incoming mail from multiple remote e-mail accounts. It is not a sendmail replacement.
I personally use fetchmail - it checks for e-mails on several different POP3 servers every 10 minutes or so, and merges them into my system's sendmail stream, then sendmail calls procmail to filter/distribute them to various mail folders and netscape.
This is very, very useful if you have several e-mail accounts and medium to high volumes of e-mail that you want to pre-sort (and spam filter) before reading - and fetchmail is very easy to use.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
-- ultra1