[jfischer]

Thank you. I think the coffee analogy is a good one and I believe that it is important that we, as technologists, express our personal values through our work. Also, I don't get this "open source is socialism thing". Although some (e.g. Stallman) may wish to see a socialist coders' paradise, 1) he's certainly entitled to that objective, and 2) the open source movement is much larger than that. These days, picking a license is often just part of selecting a business model. Companies life or die based on the ecosystem they create around their software.

[raganwald]

I think I agree with you, as I said, writing free software is more like going into competition with “The Company” than it is like organizing a union. Why not expand your ideas into a blog post? Could be excellent material...

[demallien]

Well, just to be a contrarian, I don't agree with your analogy. The analogy is more like the hippie selling people beans, but then putting a condition on the sale so that people couldn't then put the beans into a pod compatible with their favourite coffee machine. This annoys people for the same reason that DRM annoys people - deep down inside, we feel that when someone gives us something, it is now ours to do with as we like. GPL-style licenses break this unstated assumption, as does DRM stopping you from watching your favourite TV show on your media player of choice.

In fact in the case of the coffee-growing hippy, it's worse than that. He doesn't mind if you personally take your beans and put them in a pod, but this operation is time consuming and requires a not-insignificant investment in plant to make the pods. It would be wonderful if someone else could start a business doing this stuff for you and everyone else, but they can't, because the hippy wants everyone to buy into their value system, using the oh-so-good coffee beans as a trojan horse.

Yes, I know, you're probably screaming something about entitlement right now. But let's bring it back to software. Most people in this world are not capable of writing software, so they're thrilled when someone comes out with an app that meets their need just right. But then that app gets pulled from the app store because the author included some GPLed code. This is the equivalent of the kid with the bat losing at a match of cricket, so he leaves, and now the other kids can't play. They generally aren't impressed. Note that if the kid had to leave because it was dinner time, or his parents were calling him, or he just broke his arm, the wouldn't be any drama. I suspect that many people feel that someone pulling code from an app store for ideological reasons is more like sulking than leaving because it was dinner time.

[prakashk]

> This is the equivalent of the kid with the bat losing at a match of cricket, so he leaves, and now the other kids can't play. They generally aren't impressed. Note that if the kid had to leave because it was dinner time, or his parents were calling him, or he just broke his arm, the wouldn't be any drama. I suspect that many people feel that someone pulling code from an app store for ideological reasons is more like sulking than leaving because it was dinner time.

What if the kid leaving with the bat found out that the people who control the playground had imposed some rules that are not agreeable to him, and in his opinion are not favorable to the other kids at large?

[raganwald]

The only thing I’m screaming about is the idea that your views deserve a wider audience than here, especially with everyone derailed into a debate about what is or isn’t Libertarian(tm) :-)

[jfischer]

Thanks for the encouragement! I think the discussion about values and work is very important and I appreciate that you brought it up on your blog. Hopefully, a bit got through on HN before it degenerated...

[drcube]

How is Stallman's version of free software socialist? I've heard this before, and I don't understand it.

[jfischer]

Well, to call anyone a socialist outside the domain of political science is being a bit facetious. However, a loose analogy could be made. Socialism is about the government owning the means of production. The analogy would be "the base of existing software" = "means of production" and "Free Software Foundation" = "government". Stallman appears to want the copyright for all software to be held by the FSF and licensed as either GPL or AGPL. The analogy breaks down in the sense that, unlike a government, the FSF has no coercive power (beyond the value of their code base). Given the FSF's (relative) lack of coercive power, I don't think anyone should take seriously people/organizations that raise alarmist concerns about it.

[raganwald]

I actually think “little-s socialism” is about the workers owning the means of production, not the government. The difference is palpable when we’re trying to fit that word onto software development.

Government owning the means of production would be the government issuing licenses to write software. Workers owning the means of production would be that anyone can write a program without needing a license (or the fear of patent litigation from monopolists).

Licenses are anti-socialist to me, as are patents.

The whole “government runs everything” thing is sometimes called big-S Socialism, sometimes called Fascism, sometimes called Communism... But it isn’t the little-s socialism I had in mind when I wrote the post.

The government running everything is trading the farmer for some pigs.

[xlpz]

I generally agree with most of what you are saying, but honestly this litte-s socialism, fascism, communism thing you are doing is making me gnash my teeth a bit :)

Socialism was and is at its core about the working class as a whole owning the means of production, becoming the only social class in existence and in effect ending the cycle of class struggle that has defined human history for the past few thousand years (at the very least since Marx & Engels first formulated scientific socialism. Utopian socialists had similar visions of a future society but usually lacked the framework to clearly articulate their criticisms of existing societies).

The term Communism, although used since the XIX century, became mainstream in the XX as a reaction against the perceived reformism or capitulation against capitalism of the then-called "socialist democrats" of the Second International. Technically, though, Communism only means the end-goal of the socialist struggle, again a classless society where everyone works according to their capacity and receives according to their needs (see 'The Critique of the Gotha Program' by Marx, or Lenin's 'State and Revolution' where the distinction between the revolutionary transitional stage and the classless, stateless end-goal of Communism is clearly made. Yes, Lenin thought a society without any State at all was desirable). The fact that States ruled by Communist Parties implemented imperfect versions of socialism, or had any number of problems small or big, in no way should make you pretend that the definition of Communism is "the government owns everything". Or, much worse, that it is in some sense just the same thing than Fascism. This makes no sense historically or theoretically, and is about as accurate as pretending that parliamentary democracy in industrialized nations is at its core all about spending 10% of their GDP in weapons and bombing the shit out of third world countries.