The following essay was written by Slashdot Reader Philipp Koehn This
In the debate about open source software the term 'communism' comes up quite freuently. The funny thing is that both sides accuse each other of being the red danger. So what is going on?
Communism is this nice idea that a human society should not be ruled by greed and egoismus, but rather by everybody contributing an equal amount of work and sharing the results. Famous society hacker Karl Marx made the blue print, and we tried it. Now, after millions of people masacred, demoralized, and empoverished, it doesn't seem such a good idea after all.
One problem is: to insure equal and distribution everything has to be centrally planned by someone. Descisions are handed down just like by Bill Gates' Kremlin in Redmond: The proclamation of standards and software to be used from the Microsoft politburo. Leaving the trade press busy guessing the next steps of the big brother, but not questioning them.
So here we are the software freedom fighters, bringing back the right to speak up and tearing down the Berlin Wall of non disclosure agreements and closed source code. Winning back the power to the marketplace of ideas (or bazaar of ideas, if you want). Fighting the evil empire that is set to enslave us.
But there is also the other side of communism: the original idea of sharing, the distribution of goods to whoever needs them. And here the history lesson turns sour: The failure of communism indicates that this does not work. Most people don't want their equal share, and give without profiting. They want to have more. They want better cars, better houses and more shiny desktops than their neighbors. In this light the open source community is suddenly the ideal communist society that never worked on a large scale. It is too easily ripped apart by the capitalist world with its cheesy marketing appeal and cell phone envy.
So this will haunt the future of open source. The current idealism will not sustain. Historically, every spiritual movements is consequently taking over by people who take it for granted and use it for their advantage. Or, as put in "Trainspotting" more generally: everything ultimately turns to shit.
Right now we are still in the spiritual phase of the movement, with the main motivation being to build up the wave. Every big company domino that falls to Linux is greeted by cheer and excitement. Soon it will be everywhere. And then?
Cold realism will kick in. The most likely exploit of Linux will be in the field of distributions. Red Hat? Caldera? Suse? Debian? Well, nobody got ever got fired for choosing IBM Linux - of course with added value and glitzy marketing. Linux might shift away the power from Microsoft, but only into other - only argueable better - hands. Will the world be a better place? Maybe slightly, but this revolution, too, will eat its children.
| Wrong by Sanity on Tuesday September 15, @12:06PM (User Info) http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~iic |
| I disagree. I don't think Communism is a good analogy at all for the
free-software movement. I think a much better comparison can be made with
the progress of science over the past few centuries. With science, the
norm has been, until recently, that people would perform scientific research
for the good of mankind. It is this kind of research that has built the
entire foundations upon which our modern technology and standard of living
is based. I think that counts as a success. I think the analogy with open-source
is obvious.
Ok, so now science is being exploited more, patents and copyright are
being used which untimately restrict scientific progress, but software
started like this, and the open-source movement grew out of the cold, greedy
world of 'owned' software - I can't see it going back, and the GPL makes
sure it never will. |
| Open Source Software != Communism by Thornton on Tuesday September 15, @12:10PM (User Info) |
| In Communism, goods and services are distributed according to need.
In the Linux world goods and services are not distributed according to
need. The number one complaint about Linux by most people is that Linux
needs more user-friendliness. Linux "goods" are generated based on the TECHNICAL ABILITY of the individual or group to produce the goods that achieve the needs of that individual or group. In other words, newbies are in most need of Linux user-friendliness, and are least likely to get it because they lack the technical skills to produce it themselves. Once they have the technical skills, they don't need user-friendliness any more! [Note: I don't need user friendliness ... and don't want it on my Linux machines ... GUI admin tools are a waste of disk space and CPU cycles from my perspective.] Most of Linux is the product of self-interested development. It is more Libertarian or even anarchist. The reason why Linux is so successful is because it doesn't depend on altruistic motives in order to achive global domination. |
| Free Software is 100% Capitalist by palpatine ([email protected]) on Tuesday September 15, @12:10PM (User Info) http://www.gcs.bc.ca/theguardian |
| You're right about the point that the current industry of closed source
code is somewhat totalitarian when compared to government systems. If anything,
free/open source software is an example of a fully capitalist system, a
la Adam Smith. There are no trade secrets or intellectual property (no
copyrights, no patents, no secrets); GPL would work wonderfully in a world
like this. There is no regulation. There is no government. Of course, Adam Smith predicted that in a system like that, research and development would not make any sense, because it would be fully shared. I suppose that we can prove that wrong in this segment of the industry. People are willing to pay money for distribution media, documentation, and support, so that these companies do not have to worry about intellectual property. |
| One difference by bhurt ([email protected]) on Tuesday September 15, @12:12PM (User Info) |
| When I give away a car, or some grain, or any physical object, I no
longer have the physical object. If you ate the food, obviously I did not.
Software is fundamentally different- when Linus gave away his OS, he still
kept it. Linus was no _poorer_ after giving away his OS (even assuming
no benefits accrued from the action) than before. Both capitalism and communism are based on scarcity. There is only so much food, so many cars, etc, the question is how to distribute them. The difference between the two is the mechanism for the distribution of scarce goods. Scarcity doesn't apply to software. Duplicating the software is functionally free- "download all you want, we'll make more". Calling software either captialism or communism simply doesn't apply (see Eric S. Raymond's seminal paper 'Homesteading the Noosphere'). What has happened is that 'communist' has worked it's way into western (mainly American) vocabulary as a pejorative, equated to the term 'no good sh*t" (see Robert Anton Wilson). Attempting to apply 19th century economic philosphy to 21st engineering design is pointless- but politically and socially attacking rival bands of primates is not (or, rather, wether it servers a purpose or not is irrelevent to the exercise). |
| Communism? by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 15, @12:13PM (User Info) |
| It occurs to me, that Karl Marx took the idea of sharing from someone.
Anyone know where it might of came from? Further, a lot of the argument seems to be on a continuum; I think that there is always a tension between "What's good for me" and "What's good for us". We won't make that go away anytime soon. I don't think we can. But if we keep away from "What's good for them", that might be progress. A lot of the discussion has an implicit "What's good for them" tone to it. And what is this fixation with communism, anyway? If I paint my neighbors house, and he fixes my car, are we communists? or good neighbors? |
| More? I have more already. by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 15, @12:21PM (User Info) |
| One of the focal points of this article, besides the horrible slaying
of the English language, seems to be suggesting that because free software
cannot satisfy our inherant capitalist greedy desires, it's automatically
outmoded.
This sort of puzzles me, because I seem to be getting "more" with Linux/free software than I ever could with Windows. How many applications come standard with Win? Three? Four? How many applications are on the Debian CD now? 1000+? With Linux the amount of software I own is only limited by my hard drive space, whereas my friends can usually afford to go to CompUSA about once a month and pick up one (yes, one) huge piece of packaged software. It seems as if all that glitz and glamour really hinders the "more" aspect of capitalist society. In addition, glitzy packaged goods is not really against free software's idiom...there's nothing preventing Red Hat from being as garish as Microsoft...they just chose not to do it that way. I totally agree with this article that we ignorant westerners will always want more than we have, but with a resource as plentiful as information, the best way to go about getting it is to get it for free. |
| The Premise by Trick ([email protected]) on Tuesday September 15, @12:24PM (User Info) http://www.thetide.com |
| It seems to me that this entire essay is based on the belief that "everything
eventually turns to shit," and that all of the Communism parallels
are just crutches used to back up that argument. I could just as easily
come up with reasons why free software is capitalism, or just about any
other economic system. The problem with trying to compare it to an economic system, though, is that... well, it's NOT an economic system. Any comparison to one is bound to fail on several levels, especially when the person doing the comparisons seems to have a somewhat shaky understanding of the economic principles to begin with. All that aside (and really, most of the essay seems to have been written as an excuse to toss out frightening words and catch phrases like "Communism" and "Berlin Wall"), the foundation of the argument is still that "everything turns to shit." Why even bother with the Communism references? Why waste time applying it to Linux and/or free software? What's the point of shouting to the world "I'm a pessimist and I think everything's doomed?" Next editorial on Slashdot: Why we should all drive truck-bombs to Redmond: Microsoft sucks and we're all going to die anyway. |
| Open Source Software is as American as barn-raisin by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 15, @12:45PM (User Info) |
| (Opinions my own:) Not to slight the worldwide OSS community, but it's the American bystanders that seem to have a persistent itch about the political nature of the thing. It's in a developer's rational self-interest to work with OSS, for all the familiar reasons: ability to fix problems and perform tweaks, low cost, software designed for best performance instead of marketing. It's in the developer's rational self-interest to feed their bugfixes, expansions and improvements back out to the community so that others can debug them and improve on them. Feeding the fixes and tweaks back into the community codebase also means that the next version will probably incorporate them, so the developer doesn't waste time patching the same bugs in version after version, hoping that someone else's improvements don't break the patches. Contributing to a community that's part of one's own support system is sensible politics for any Libertarian. The medium of exchange isn't money, it's something more immediate: increased efficacy. Stormbringer |
| Comments by Gleef ([email protected]) on Tuesday September 15, @12:51PM (User Info) |
| First, just because the Soviet and satellite governments failed does
not mean "the failure of communism". Since the failure of communism
seems to be a central assumtion in your paper, I will elaborate. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels(in the Communist Manifesto, Kapital, and other writings) laid out a specification of Communism. This specification was based on the wealth and problems of his surroundings, which was the industrialized Western European countries (particularly Prussia and England) of the mid-19th century. Lenin put in place an implementation of communism in agrarian Russia. Russia was far poorer than the countries Marx had in mind, and did not have the industrial infrastructure that Marx had assumed would be present. To accomodate this, Lenin tweaked the communist formula greatly. By the time communism was installed in other countries, it had been through either the drastic revision by Stalin or the code fork by Mao Zedong (Albania may be an exception, I don't know enough about them). These revisions brought the implementations that were being called "Communism" so far away from the specification to be unrecognizable. The fact that the Stalin-based code tree failed (and many of us want the Mao tree to fail as well) is clearly an implementation failure, not a specification failure. Communism has been very poorly implemented in this century. A few of the ideals given by the Marx match the ideals espoused by the Free Software movement, they also match ideals given by most major religions, and any decent ethics textbook. That and the fact that both Marx and Stallman were/are very fuzzy people are the only things I see shared between Marxism and Free Software. Between these two points, I do not see the fall of communism as a danger sign for the Free Software movement. Going to your other points, market exploitation is a serious risk in the Free Software movement. Sun exploited the BSD source in SunOS. The Free Software Foundation and the GPL were started specifically to fight such abuses. It has yet to be seen if they have the resources to handle a major legal battle, but they have already been a strong force outside of the courtroom. You seem to imply that the Free Software movement is new, and still in its youthful idealistic phase. While that may be the case for some individuals, the Free Software movement dates back to the 1970's. The Free Software Foundation itself is over ten years old, that's older than most software companies, ancient in computer terms. I think the movement has shown itself to be both mature and robust. And it is growing. In order for a company to truly hijack Linux and destroy the movement would require one of two things, either a blatant violation of the GPL followed by a successful legal battle, or addition of some proprietary standard that everyone wants, which cannot be responded to by the Free Software community. I don't see either of these as particularly likely, so I am not worried. |