Posted on 11/23/2005 7:03:10 PM PST by Halfmanhalfamazing
This month, SAP's Shai Agassi referred to open-source software as "intellectual property socialism." In January, Bill Gates suggested that free-software developers are communists. A few years earlier, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called the open-source operating system Linux "a cancer."
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Now Richard Stallman? Be a commie or not, I don't know. He portrays himself as one. Telling everybody what they *MUST* do, forcing his ideals upon everybody else. And when a compromise is set forth, it isn't good enough.
I won't argue that the majority of linux/OSS users are leftists, but for the most part the ideology too look for is Altruism.(that you give on/of your own will without being forced which doesn't fit socialism)
If anything, it can be argued that Microsoft and Apple are the communists/collectivists. In either case you are dependent on one source(MS/A) and these two encourage assimilation/sameness.
With OSS(linux) you're much more empowered as an individual, encouraged to *be* individual, and competition is much more embraced. And of course, with increased competition comes leading edge innovation. That's why even parts of OSX.4 were catch-up additions.
(from the article)^^^^^^^^^Not only can more than one company rake in the dough, the other guys can alter your product any way they see fit, as long as they share these upgrades with everyone else. That's where the socialism rap comes in.^^^^^^^^^^
In Bill Gates' and Steve Jobs' reality-distorted worlds.
How hard is it to be an entrepreneur in a communist/socialist society? You get pushed out pretty quick by the brute force of the government, if you can even get your feet off the ground in the first place.
That sounds eerily like what Microsoft has done to quite a few of the competitors who've tried to challenge them. MS beat them with brute force, not a better product.
So what're you doing defending communists?
ping
Open source is actually a more free market than what we have now, where most roads lead through Microsoft. By nature it is anti-regulation, which can't be bad for us. At the moment, if the government wants to, say, spy on us through our computers, all it has to do is ask Microsoft to put in the code. Through open source that couldn't happen, there would be too many products to make it practical, and because the source is open, such code could be read for what it does.
Pinging To The Choir
Bingo.
Though I wonder.........
Can free-market communism exist?
I doubt that golden eagle will stop going around calling OSS communism, so I guess the answer is yes.
Long live Linux and Mozilla Firefox
It's not communism at all - exactly the opposite in fact. What we have now is far far closer to communist - which by definition is a centrally managed economy (in this case the manager is Microsoft rather than a government, but in practice it differs only in that Microsoft is slightly more responsive) - than any open source proposal.
Open source is a libertarian/free-market approach, not a liberal one. Microsoft is far more useful to the political left than open source would be, it provides a platform for dictating to individual users, whereas open source would give the users as many choices as a free market would give them.
The basic principle behind OSS, from what I understand, is that a lot of software is written by people who gain little or nothing by keeping it secret. Releasing the code publicly may offer some rewards, and even if those rewards are not likely to big, they may exceed the trivial costs.
The new monthly web server log file statistics will be out next week - and once again, the numbers will show ten times more Mac users than Linux users on the Internet.
Communal societies can exist and function provided that the productive members can know who deserves to share in the benefits of their production and can ensure that the benefits go to those people.
In small communal societies, people can know who's productive and who's lazy without having to explicitly keep records. In larger societies, this becomes impractical.
The real value of money is that it provides a means by which productive members of society can communicate with other members of society about who else is productive and is worthy of sharing in the benefits of production.
BTW, software is very different from most other commodities, in that someone who freeloads off other people's development efforts does not reduce their ability to enjoy them. Indeed, even the freeloader may sometimes offer benefits if he ends up letting people know about bugs he finds that might otherwise have gone undiagnosed.
Thanks, should be interesting reading this thread!
Communism replaces individual responsibility with "rights of the people", replaces reliance on self initiative with dependence on the state, and replaces the economics of "you get what you work for" with the economics of "from each according to their ability, to the leaders according to their greed."
Linux work depends very much on the skill, initiative and integrity of the individuals. We each gain the respect and authority that we deserve, depending on the value of our work. We each have final control over how, when and in what manner we participate. No one, not even the King Penguin Linus Torvalds, gets a free pass.
Information, honesty, and integrity are wide spread; spin doctoring, misinformation, lies, deceit, beauracracy and abuse of power are minimal.
The monetary pay is indirect - one usually needs to find a company that is desparate enough for some of the commercial and technology benefits of participating in Linux to pay your salary to work in Linux related areas that are also of benefit to that company.
But the pay that drives the real energy and focus is not so much money, once one has a reasonable amount of income. Rather it is the same thrill as drives the Pajamadeen (freepers in pajamas) and many other interests, the thrill of doing neat stuff for valuable ends that few others can do, of making an essential and valuable contribution to ones "community", and of "living" in a community of neat and diverse people that one finds worthy of ones energy and a pleasure to be around.
Equating Linux or Open Source (GPL license) work with communism because of apparent similarity in the monetary arrangements is utterly bogus.
Stop attacking me.
^^^^^^^Equating Linux or Open Source (GPL license) work with communism because of apparent similarity in the monetary arrangements is utterly bogus.^^^^^^^
Yup. But that is the way of Microsoft(don't forget Apple). FUD, disinformation, propaganda...... hey, didn't the KGB do all of that too?
:-P
According to the report I received just moments ago from Dallas, Texas - The Apple Stores are filled with shoppers right now, and the Linux stores aren't.
Amazon.com - Today's most popular operating systems. Mac OS X is #1, Windows is #2 and #3, SuSE Linux is #4.
If you include embedded processors, such as TiVO, router, smartphone, handheld, audio, video, and pda, Linux is the strong leader.
From an article on LinuxDevices.com:
Which OSes have been in your (or company's) embedded systems during the past 2 years? Which will be used during the next two?
At the high end, Linux is driving some of world's most powerful computers, such as NASA Lands SGI, Intel For 10,000-processor Supercomputer.
They aren't Dell, so you aren't seeing Dell's much higher volume of Windows PC's. Most copies of Windows XP are sold with the hardware, not separately sold, as with the annual upgrades to Mac OS X. Amazon is clearly doing better on the Apple side of things, both hardware and software, than some vendors.
Another problem with these stats, not evident here, is that many copies of Linux are running on hardware sold with a Windows license. The three desktops that I am switching between right now are like that.
And yet another problem with such stats is that there are many brands of Linux sold or downloaded, and that each copy of a Linux distribution is licensed to be installed as many times as you like. So the original sales of a single Linux distribution are a much smaller percentage of the installed base than with Mac OS X or Windows.
Many indeed are of a leftward tilt but not all.
I'm a registered Republican who uses Linux.
Stable and cost-effective are pluses no matter what side of the fence you sit upon :)
I honestly cannot remember the last time I was forced to reboot any of my computers.
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