Re: [OS:N:] RE: N:] Open Source as a form of Anarcho-Communism?

["M. Fioretti" <m fioretti inwind it>]

Paul,

You have sent a NEW message starting a NEW argument REPLYING to un
unrelated thread. This (and all the direct replies it got) is BAD.

Please EVERYBODY read in the archives of this list my messages of Feb 27 2003,
titled "How to use each mailing list", and follow those directions in
the future.

About your paper, now:

If you want to write about these issues, you must have extremely clear
the difference between Free SW and Open Source SW. From what you
write, I have the feeling that you are thinking to the first, but
naming the second. Free SW came up at the dawn of the net, and was
"formalized" in the early eighties by Stallman. OSS popped up in the
late 90s to make *corporations* happy. They are both good and needed,
but different.

I highly recommend (besides ESR essays already mentioned) the latest
Stallman's book, and his other essays available online.

Another thing to consider is that Free/OS SW has nothing against
making (huge) proficts from software (see the GPL itself and its FAQ)  

Last but not least general advice: I think that you should make very
clear, first to yourself, and then in the very first lines of you
paper, if you want to discuss the Free SW / OSS community and
*nothing* else (ie only its internal dynamics), or how it impacts the
real world, and why people with real, non-sw problems join or support
it (ie the impacts that Free SW / OSS has outside its own community)

This may also avoid you a lot of heat: there are thousands of
programmers, starting from ESR, who would yell real loud at you if you
came out to say or assume that they "anarcho-communism" applies to
other spheres of life (assuming that your thesis is right, which I
don't think).

Specific comments follow. Keep us posted.

	Ciao,
		Marco Fioretti
> 
> Open sourcers reject capitalist ideology of supply-demand economics, open
> source programmers actively give their Intellectual property away - to 1 or
> 10'000'000 people.

Free SW / OSS goes hand in hand with a truly monopoly-free market,
where consumers can chose a much higher variety of products, can
really ask that something is produced to meet exactly their real
needs, and producers can compete with each others, with equal
opportunities, to get the business of those customers. Can it get more
capitalistic (in the original sense) than that?

> Communist belief endorsing Good of the all over the few - All can benefit
> from open source product, only relatively affluent can afford to even use
> microsoft and even then, the source code is copyrighted intellectual
> property

False. Please read the RULE project home page, and its FAQ (URL in my
signature). Apart from that, I repeat, OSS was defined for
corporations, who could not care less about less affluent people. The
comments already made about "there is no such thing as intellectual
property" also apply.
> 
> In ideal anarchist communities, the collective creates enough material to be
> independent from the states, open source is actively creating enough
> electronic material to be free of capitalist endorsed proprietary software.

There are quite a lot of governments and politicians, of the kind who
considers Bush just a bit less communist than Castro, who think that
*in* *order* to become really capitalist (pursue mazimum profit, cut
unnecessary expenses, get really deregulated market...) they cannot
depend by overpriced foreign software
> 
> However, open source communities are also technocracies (to an extent -
> governed by technicians: a social system in which scientists, engineers, and
> technicians have high social  standing and political power).
> 
> The open source commnity appears to be a 'gift economy' - where giving away
> code/ideas/advice is highly desirable and valuable. The more code and
> information the user creates/reproduces and gives to others, the more valued
> they are in the community.
> 
> It seems that, if the open source community is a mini-anarcho-communist
> community, it co-exists within a larger capitalist owned structure called
> the Internet.  It actually depends on it for it's existence to an extent -
> would Linux be where it is today without the Internet?  It is unlikely - the
> net has allowed hundreds of thousands of motivated programmers/testers/users
> to help develop and refine many forms of open source software.
> 
Free SW created the Internet, and wouldn't exist without it. Yes. The
monopolies (not necessarily the capitalist) are trying to own it

	Ciao,
		Marco Fioretti
-- 
Marco Fioretti                 m.fioretti, at the server inwind.it
Red Hat for low memory         http://www.rule-project.org/en/

"To turn $100 into $110 is work. To turn $100 million into $110 million
is inevitable" -- Edgar Bronfman