Why do people bother with open source?
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Re: Why do people bother with open source?
#2I don’t see free software as anti-capitalist. When the FSF got started they sold tapes of free software, prior to that Stallman did that himself to make money. The FSF kept doing it until it was impractical but a good way for companies to make a donation and receive something practical in return. The tapes also came with printed manuals and tshirts.
Re: Why do people bother with open source?
#3I don’t see free software as anti-capitalist. When the FSF got started they sold tapes of free software, prior to that Stallman did that himself to make money. The FSF kept doing it until it was impractical but a good way for companies to make a donation and receive something practical in return. The tapes also came with printed manuals and tshirts.
I wouldn't necessarily say that it isn't anti-capitalist. Free software is perfectly compatible with a free market but the ethos of free software is pretty anti capitalist.
Re: Why do people bother with open source?
#4Majority of projects, does not mean majority of code. Big projects have large numbers of contributors and far more code. The linux kernel is one project, a few lines of code might be one project too.
The anti-capitalist bit is not true. All the major open source licenses allow commercial use. Open source (especially copyleft) is encourages free markets because it makes it harder to erect barrier to entry or lock customers in.
I do not get why it is pernicious for employers to look at open source contributions either.
Re: Why do people bother with open source?
#5I have a "pay it forward" sort of attitude personally. The open source world is probably the largest, most valuable commons in the world by monetary value. I can't even think of a competitor, honestly. There are plenty of communities that are very open about their skills and knowledge, but there is just no equivalent to the way I can pick up thousands or even millions of person-years of labor and just drop it into my project, and it does its thing without me having to study every subsystem individually or pay the the millions of dollars it would take to write it bespoke for me. For example, the 3D printing community shares a lot of designs but there is no design comparable to the Linux kernel, because, after all, how could a design or even quite sizable set of designs manage that?
My contributions, feeble as they may feel as a single contributor, is my way of making sure I'm not just taking from the world, but at least trying to give back. A payment of sorts. Open source may not generally demand such payment, but by Kant's imperative, if everybody takes and nobody contributes, there will soon be nothing to take from, so I really ought to try my best to contribute reasonably as well, even just in the form of reproducible bug reports, documentation updates, or a tiny improvement here and a tiny improvement there.
Re: Why do people bother with open source?
#6I don’t see free software as anti-capitalist. When the FSF got started they sold tapes of free software, prior to that Stallman did that himself to make money. The FSF kept doing it until it was impractical but a good way for companies to make a donation and receive something practical in return. The tapes also came with printed manuals and tshirts.
I wouldn't necessarily say that it isn't anti-capitalist. Free software is perfectly compatible with a free market but the ethos of free software is pretty anti capitalist.
Tangent time. I genuinely don't understand what people generally mean when they use the phrase "anti-capitalist". I doubt most are Tankies or full-on Utopian Anarchists. I suspect a fair few mean "I want a mixed economy that's (a lot) fairer than the one we've got now" (which is probably my position).
But outside of these three positions - what do people mean?
Re: Why do people bother with open source?
#7I don’t see free software as anti-capitalist. When the FSF got started they sold tapes of free software, prior to that Stallman did that himself to make money. The FSF kept doing it until it was impractical but a good way for companies to make a donation and receive something practical in return. The tapes also came with printed manuals and tshirts.
Selling things isn't capitalism.
Capitalism would mean investors putting in money early and getting an ownership stake and payouts later.
Re: Why do people bother with open source?
#8Honestly it just feels pretty good to make something and put it out there, regardless of whether or not it’s popular. Creating is a very fulfilling thing, even if just for its own sake. I don’t do it for money but if I got money (for the right reasons) I wouldn’t say no.
Re: Why do people bother with open source?
#9I don’t see free software as anti-capitalist. When the FSF got started they sold tapes of free software, prior to that Stallman did that himself to make money. The FSF kept doing it until it was impractical but a good way for companies to make a donation and receive something practical in return. The tapes also came with printed manuals and tshirts.
Not arguing on whether free software is or not anti-capitalist, but want to point out that the act of monetizing goods and services isn't incompatible with anti-capitalism.
Re: Why do people bother with open source?
#10I don’t see free software as anti-capitalist. When the FSF got started they sold tapes of free software, prior to that Stallman did that himself to make money. The FSF kept doing it until it was impractical but a good way for companies to make a donation and receive something practical in return. The tapes also came with printed manuals and tshirts.
I wouldn't necessarily say that it isn't anti-capitalist. Free software is perfectly compatible with a free market but the ethos of free software is pretty anti capitalist.
Stallman and friends were always very clear that they love money. Even back in the 90's he was saying that selling Free software and making lots of money is one of the most ethical things you could do. That doesn't mean anyone actually could. I think you're all using the wrong mental framework to think about these things. Just because the Free software movement has used similar strategies to another famous group of historical people, doesn't mean they're the same group of people. Anti-capitalists love the Free software movement, because they can see what they're actually doing with their actions, and that it speaks to some kind of deeper value. I like to call that "moving leverage to the edge". If you do things like empower everyday people with access to knowledge and privileges they wouldn't have had otherwise, then they'll like you. It matters not what ideology you profess to have. People are simply attracted to alpha, and open source has always had lots of it.