The abrupt merging of Nouveau

Posted Dec 16, 2009 12:15 UTC (Wed) by cventers (guest, #31465)
In reply to: The abrupt merging of Nouveau by jmm82
Parent article: The abrupt merging of Nouveau

I've always found Free Software / Open Source to be so fascination... the marriage of capitalism and socialism into an extremely effective vehicle for improving everyone's lives. This dynamic will only continue to grow.

Socialism doesn't work with scarcity. But ideas are free!

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The abrupt merging of Nouveau

Posted Dec 16, 2009 17:49 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (5 responses)

The word your looking for is 'Freedom'.

Pretty much everything works better when individuals are allowed to do as
they please. They will take time to work together and get along and form
orginizations simply because it's in their best interest.

"Socialism" in the way that it means that people work together and
"Capitolism" in the way that people will automatically create a system for
exchanging currency and creating businesses if left to their own devices
are pretty much exactly the same thing. Creating social networks and
creating a monetary system (whether it be code or credit) and a work-reward
system is as natural to humans as breathing.

It's when you start creating rules and people try to exert authority over
one another in order to try to drive people to follow in their own
particular viewpoint of the world is when bad shit starts happening.

The basic take-away is that when you put a small amount of people in charge
a large amount of people you have a break down and inefficiencies. When
people are allowed to do things on their own in a distributed manner then
that is when we can reach highest efficiencies.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

Posted Dec 20, 2009 4:08 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't see where socialism enters into the open source situation.

Socialism requires a central government to determine what each person's contribution to society should be (and enforce it). There isn't anything like that in open source.

I do see a social responsibility or altruism angle, where someone voluntarily contributes code or licenses with GPL in order to bring about a better world for everyone, but that's basically welfare, which goes hand in hand with capitalism, not socialism.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

Posted Dec 20, 2009 4:21 UTC (Sun) by jmm82 (guest, #59425) [Link]

Corperations do not hire subsystem maintainers as good philantropists.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

Posted Dec 24, 2009 22:15 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

That's not socialism, that's communism ...

Actually, it's probably better described as Stalinism - where the government takes everything in the name of the people and then the elite use it as their own personal property.

Just like fascism, in fact.

In fact, also pretty much like the current "capitalist" setup - where the government and their cronies are walking off with all our money TODAY. What are the recent boom and current bust iof not yet another means for the already-rich to get even richer?

Cheers,
Wol

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

Posted Dec 26, 2009 21:21 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

Socialism is a mixture of capitalism and communism (Marx thought it was a stepping stone on the way to communism). So for open source to be socialist, it would still need a central authority to direct some resources. And I don't see one.

Neither socialism, communism, nor capitalism imply that government employees take stuff that rightfully belongs to others or that rich people get stuff that rightfully belongs to non-rich people, so whether that's in fact what happens when societies attempt to set up these economic systems, it really isn't relevant to the question of whether the existing open source economy is socialist, capitalist, or whatever.

The abrupt merging of Nouveau

Posted Jan 19, 2010 20:29 UTC (Tue) by personman (guest, #63100) [Link]

In my opinion, open source is anarchist, and anarchism is properly understood as a decentralized, cooperative, collectivist, libertarian-socialism.

Decision making is largely done collectively and cooperatively, in a participatory fashion, rather than a central authority atop a hierarchy.

Socialism only requires a centralized authority if you are referring to authoritarian socialism. Libertarian-socialism (anarchism) is a different deal. My two cents...

-Andy
AnarchismToday.org