6 ms·

I don't like how people get defensive around capitalism; "our ideas are not at odds with capitalism", ok, so what if they were? If an idea is at odds with capit

by hasenj 16y ago

I don't like how people get defensive around capitalism; "our ideas are not at odds with capitalism", ok, so what if they were? If an idea is at odds with capitalism, that doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea. For instance, I think the idea of free software (RMS style) really is at odds with capitalism; but so what? This is not a good reason to agree or disagree with the idea.

olalonde 16y ago
Free software isn't at odds with capitalism. In fact, right of property is what makes free software possible (otherwise you couldn't enforce any free software license).
- hasenj 16y ago
  GPL is a hack; its existence is not an approval of the system in any way, shape or form. That's not the point though. Whether Free Software is at odds (or not) with capitalism shouldn't matter at all in any intelligent discussion.
  - olalonde 16y ago
    You're right in the sense that the free software movement as advocated by Richard Stallman is at odds with capitalism. I really meant "Open source software isn't at odds with capitalism". But I don't think we should exclude the capitalism debate from an intelligent discussion since it has pretty huge implications. If you're advocating a system that is incompatible with capitalism, you have to first make the case for an alternative to capitalism.
    - hasenj 16y ago
      It's not as if we live in a purely capitalistic system. In a pure capitalism, there would be no taxes. Yet here we are living in a system where the government takes money from you, specially if you're really rich. It's not as though any idea that's at odds with capitalism will require "an alternative system". There's not gonna be any change to the system that requires a new theory of economics. Suppose bitcoins are at odds with capitalism because they're just like gold (yes I know this is ridiculous, but just for argument's sake). What now? Should bitcoiners make a case for an "alternative to capitalism"? No. You will still be able to buy and sell and own property and trade and own factories and rent an office space and build a company and hire employees.
      - olalonde 16y ago
        I agree that we don't live in a purely capitalist system and in fact, I don't like to call it that way as it undermines its meaning. In a truly capitalist system we wouldn't have this discussion at all since there'd be no federal reserve and currencies would be free to compete against each others. In my opinion, Bitcoin (and the gold standard in some ways) is as close to capitalism as it gets.
        hasenj 16y ago
        "as close to capitalism as it gets" is not necessarily a good thing. As someone else pointed out, in a pure capitalism, we'd have slaves, child porn, thugs for hire, assassination contracts, etc. I just got this idea right now, but I think a pure capitalism will deteriorate very quickly into a dictatorship. All it takes is for someone to accumulate enough military power so that he can take over. Assuming you can buy/sell groups of armed people and/or hire them.
        olalonde 16y ago
        You've got it all wrong. Those things are the antithesis of capitalism. I really don't know where to start... May I suggest you watch this documentary: http://www.freetochoose.tv/ http://www.freetochoose.tv/
        nazgulnarsil 16y ago
        I can summarize. in a purely free market people won't want to do business with people who violate others' property rights since you have no guarantee they won't violate yours. traditionally, guarantees against this have been ethnic. "well I know he won't enslave me since the norm is to only enslave blacks, therefore we can both happily profit from the slave trade and are no threat to each other."
        Amincd 16y ago
        " As someone else pointed out, in a pure capitalism, we'd have slaves, child porn, thugs for hire, assassination contracts, etc." No you wouldn't. All of those things are the exact opposite of capitalism, since they prevent voluntary association and threaten body, liberty and property.
chc 16y ago
Your viewpoint is only sensible if one is neutral or negative toward capitalism and assumes everyone else must be as well. If you think capitalism is a good thing, then of course something being at odds with it is problematic.
- m0nty 16y ago
  "If you think capitalism is a good thing, then of course something being at odds with it is problematic." Something can be problematic but that still doesn't make it a bad idea. It might be a brilliant idea which challenges you to modify your viewpoint - perhaps you end up questioning the particular form of capitalism which you think is good. Perhaps you end up endorsing your former viewpoint and discarding the new idea. hasenj's point is perfectly valid: "If an idea is at odds with capitalism, that doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea" (even if it might be problematic).
- hasenj 16y ago
  Even if you think it's a great idea; it's still possible to be ok with new good ideas even if they happen to be at odds with capitalism. For instance, I think Open Source is a great idea, but this alone is not good enough reason to think that selling iPhone apps is evil. Acting very cautious and defensive around capitalism makes it look like a holy untouchable ideology; this is what annoys me.
  - olalonde 16y ago
    Again, Open Source is not at odds with capitalism. Capitalism doesn't mean making money or selling stuff. In fact, charities aren't at odds with capitalism. Did you know that Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Whales, is a libertarian?
    - hasenj 16y ago
      Ah careful. RMS's Free Software is not the same thing as Open Source. Open Source in and of itself is not at odds with capitalism. But Free Software is at odds with some ideas of capitalism. (In my humble opinion anyway, which is really irrelevant to my original point).
jsn 16y ago
Free software isn't at odds with capitalism (you don't have to extract monetary profit from everything you do in capitalism). Neither is bitcoin. Government-controlled paper money, on the other hand, definitely is at odds with free market.
- hasenj 16y ago
  I think free software is at odds with certain capitalistic ideas: As a private owner of a "production" factory, you have control over your products, and through this control you gain profit. Contrast this with communism, which views private control over things which are needed by the public (like food) as a bad idea because the person in charge gets to limit the freedom of others (or some idea similar to that). Free Software is similar in this regard: software is ubiquitous, and so it's unethical (according to the philosophy of the FSF) to let it be under the control of corporations. Apple has complete control over iPhones, and they decide what you can and cannot do with it: this is "evil", according to FSF's philosophy. From a purely capitalistic point of view: a software developer gets an incentive to create and evolve software if it was closed source and hard to crack so that he could sell it and get profit. From a market perspective, this is more efficient. But, from RMS's perspective, market efficiency shouldn't matter here because the act of putting artificial restriction on software usage is unethical. While I don't agree with RMS about this thing being necessarily unethical in and of itself; I do find his arguments very compelling, and I'm inclined to say that it's best if one was able to make money doing open source. However, I think one has to be realistic, and in reality developers need money, and so it's ok to sell closed apps (as in iPhone apps, or SaaS webapps like 37signals). As you can see, my position doesn't have anything to do with capitalism as an ideology.
  - dalke 16y ago
    The issue is your statement "you have control over your products" does not apply. Copyright law legally prevents you from including someone else's software in your work, unless you get permission. The GPL grants you that permission so long as you follow the terms of the license. In other words, it isn't "your products", it's a joint product, and the other contributor wants a say on how the joint product is delivered. If your product doesn't use anyone else's license, then the FSF does say that it's morally reprehensible to not have free software, but they stay well within copyright law to change the system from within. Have you considered that perhaps it's copyright's temporary monopoly grant which is "at odds with certain capitalistic ideas"? After all, copyright in US law comes from promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts", not making profit.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- hasenj 16y ago
  This is not RMS's point of view. RMS doesn't care if you give him back your changes; he cares that you have the freedom to make any changes you wish. He wants you to be free from artificial restrictions imposed by copyright laws. He doesn't care if you share your changes with him.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - geon 16y ago
    > He doesn't care if you share your changes with him. Well, he does care if you make your changes available to the users of your software so that they too can make the changes they need. That's the whole point of the license, or you should just use MIT/BSD.
    - hasenj 16y ago
      Yes, so he cares about the freedom of the user to change software. He doesn't care whether or not these users share these changes with each other and collaborate to develop the software. Although he thinks that's a nice-to-have side effect. He cares that this freedom propagates to all users, not just you, and so just like he gave you this freedom, you also must pass on this freedom.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
Amincd 16y ago
Capitalism means non-government intervention in your voluntary agreements and interactions with others. In other words, it's freedom.
- _delirium 16y ago
  There's a lot of disagreement over that word "voluntary", though. People who emphasize the "capitalism" part, as in anarcho-capitalists, tend to take a very loose view of what constitutes voluntary agreement, which is basically anything short of initiating actual physical violence, or perhaps direct threats like putting a gun to someone's head. Others, from the more left-leaning parts of voluntaryist circles, require a stronger definition of voluntary. The standards of traditional western contract law for what counts as a voluntary agreement (i.e. not one entered into under coercion or duress) are somewhere in between.
Duff 16y ago
Here's what what said about the gold standard to differentiate from Bitcoin: "There was no choice in how one could pay, payments were made in a vacuum. All transactions had to be made in a currency backed by gold. That meant that any abuse of the Standard could affect the economy negatively and runs on banks were almost inevitable." So what? People were and are always free to transact business in any way that they would like, but the coin of the realm that you are required to accept and pay taxes with is/was gold. That doesn't mean that I can't exchange a few bushels of wheat for a goat. Or some coupons for car washes for a sandwich. Or some bitcoin for a webhosting, or whatever you buy with bitcoin. Bitcoin is only against capitalism in the sense that nobody is going to make a significant amount of money from it.
- kolinko 16y ago
  Saying that "bitcoin means freedom to choose a form of payment" is naive. Let's say that Bitcoin is success, and 98% of internet merchants accept bitcoins as a mean of payment. This will mean that once I open up a shop, I have to accept it as well, or I'll lose sales. Of course, in theory, nobody would force me to accept Bitcoins, but so is the case today - nobody forces me to use Dollars, or PayPal.
  - Duff 16y ago
    But again, barring some magical event that entices 98% of merchants to accept Bitcoin, why would you accept it versus gold, silver etc? You still need a middleman to broker the transaction to whatever the legal tender currency is, so why not just exchange shares of GLD or SLV online?
  - dpatru 16y ago
    > nobody forces me to use Dollars Actually, if you're in the US, you do have to use dollars. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender#United_States and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Dollar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Dollar.
    - Duff 16y ago

by hasenj 16y ago

olalonde 16y ago

Free software isn't at odds with capitalism. In fact, right of property is what makes free software possible (otherwise you couldn't enforce any free software license).

hasenj 16y ago
GPL is a hack; its existence is not an approval of the system in any way, shape or form. That's not the point though. Whether Free Software is at odds (or not) with capitalism shouldn't matter at all in any intelligent discussion.
- olalonde 16y ago
  You're right in the sense that the free software movement as advocated by Richard Stallman is at odds with capitalism. I really meant "Open source software isn't at odds with capitalism". But I don't think we should exclude the capitalism debate from an intelligent discussion since it has pretty huge implications. If you're advocating a system that is incompatible with capitalism, you have to first make the case for an alternative to capitalism.
  - hasenj 16y ago
    It's not as if we live in a purely capitalistic system. In a pure capitalism, there would be no taxes. Yet here we are living in a system where the government takes money from you, specially if you're really rich. It's not as though any idea that's at odds with capitalism will require "an alternative system". There's not gonna be any change to the system that requires a new theory of economics. Suppose bitcoins are at odds with capitalism because they're just like gold (yes I know this is ridiculous, but just for argument's sake). What now? Should bitcoiners make a case for an "alternative to capitalism"? No. You will still be able to buy and sell and own property and trade and own factories and rent an office space and build a company and hire employees.
    - olalonde 16y ago
      I agree that we don't live in a purely capitalist system and in fact, I don't like to call it that way as it undermines its meaning. In a truly capitalist system we wouldn't have this discussion at all since there'd be no federal reserve and currencies would be free to compete against each others. In my opinion, Bitcoin (and the gold standard in some ways) is as close to capitalism as it gets.
      - hasenj 16y ago
        "as close to capitalism as it gets" is not necessarily a good thing. As someone else pointed out, in a pure capitalism, we'd have slaves, child porn, thugs for hire, assassination contracts, etc. I just got this idea right now, but I think a pure capitalism will deteriorate very quickly into a dictatorship. All it takes is for someone to accumulate enough military power so that he can take over. Assuming you can buy/sell groups of armed people and/or hire them.
        olalonde 16y ago
        You've got it all wrong. Those things are the antithesis of capitalism. I really don't know where to start... May I suggest you watch this documentary: http://www.freetochoose.tv/ http://www.freetochoose.tv/
        nazgulnarsil 16y ago
        I can summarize. in a purely free market people won't want to do business with people who violate others' property rights since you have no guarantee they won't violate yours. traditionally, guarantees against this have been ethnic. "well I know he won't enslave me since the norm is to only enslave blacks, therefore we can both happily profit from the slave trade and are no threat to each other."
      - Amincd 16y ago
        " As someone else pointed out, in a pure capitalism, we'd have slaves, child porn, thugs for hire, assassination contracts, etc." No you wouldn't. All of those things are the exact opposite of capitalism, since they prevent voluntary association and threaten body, liberty and property.

chc 16y ago

Your viewpoint is only sensible if one is neutral or negative toward capitalism and assumes everyone else must be as well. If you think capitalism is a good thing, then of course something being at odds with it is problematic.

m0nty 16y ago
"If you think capitalism is a good thing, then of course something being at odds with it is problematic." Something can be problematic but that still doesn't make it a bad idea. It might be a brilliant idea which challenges you to modify your viewpoint - perhaps you end up questioning the particular form of capitalism which you think is good. Perhaps you end up endorsing your former viewpoint and discarding the new idea. hasenj's point is perfectly valid: "If an idea is at odds with capitalism, that doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea" (even if it might be problematic).
hasenj 16y ago
Even if you think it's a great idea; it's still possible to be ok with new good ideas even if they happen to be at odds with capitalism. For instance, I think Open Source is a great idea, but this alone is not good enough reason to think that selling iPhone apps is evil. Acting very cautious and defensive around capitalism makes it look like a holy untouchable ideology; this is what annoys me.
- olalonde 16y ago
  Again, Open Source is not at odds with capitalism. Capitalism doesn't mean making money or selling stuff. In fact, charities aren't at odds with capitalism. Did you know that Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Whales, is a libertarian?
  - hasenj 16y ago
    Ah careful. RMS's Free Software is not the same thing as Open Source. Open Source in and of itself is not at odds with capitalism. But Free Software is at odds with some ideas of capitalism. (In my humble opinion anyway, which is really irrelevant to my original point).

jsn 16y ago

Free software isn't at odds with capitalism (you don't have to extract monetary profit from everything you do in capitalism). Neither is bitcoin. Government-controlled paper money, on the other hand, definitely is at odds with free market.

hasenj 16y ago
I think free software is at odds with certain capitalistic ideas: As a private owner of a "production" factory, you have control over your products, and through this control you gain profit. Contrast this with communism, which views private control over things which are needed by the public (like food) as a bad idea because the person in charge gets to limit the freedom of others (or some idea similar to that). Free Software is similar in this regard: software is ubiquitous, and so it's unethical (according to the philosophy of the FSF) to let it be under the control of corporations. Apple has complete control over iPhones, and they decide what you can and cannot do with it: this is "evil", according to FSF's philosophy. From a purely capitalistic point of view: a software developer gets an incentive to create and evolve software if it was closed source and hard to crack so that he could sell it and get profit. From a market perspective, this is more efficient. But, from RMS's perspective, market efficiency shouldn't matter here because the act of putting artificial restriction on software usage is unethical. While I don't agree with RMS about this thing being necessarily unethical in and of itself; I do find his arguments very compelling, and I'm inclined to say that it's best if one was able to make money doing open source. However, I think one has to be realistic, and in reality developers need money, and so it's ok to sell closed apps (as in iPhone apps, or SaaS webapps like 37signals). As you can see, my position doesn't have anything to do with capitalism as an ideology.
- dalke 16y ago
  The issue is your statement "you have control over your products" does not apply. Copyright law legally prevents you from including someone else's software in your work, unless you get permission. The GPL grants you that permission so long as you follow the terms of the license. In other words, it isn't "your products", it's a joint product, and the other contributor wants a say on how the joint product is delivered. If your product doesn't use anyone else's license, then the FSF does say that it's morally reprehensible to not have free software, but they stay well within copyright law to change the system from within. Have you considered that perhaps it's copyright's temporary monopoly grant which is "at odds with certain capitalistic ideas"? After all, copyright in US law comes from promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts", not making profit.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

hasenj 16y ago
This is not RMS's point of view. RMS doesn't care if you give him back your changes; he cares that you have the freedom to make any changes you wish. He wants you to be free from artificial restrictions imposed by copyright laws. He doesn't care if you share your changes with him.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- geon 16y ago
  > He doesn't care if you share your changes with him. Well, he does care if you make your changes available to the users of your software so that they too can make the changes they need. That's the whole point of the license, or you should just use MIT/BSD.
  - hasenj 16y ago
    Yes, so he cares about the freedom of the user to change software. He doesn't care whether or not these users share these changes with each other and collaborate to develop the software. Although he thinks that's a nice-to-have side effect. He cares that this freedom propagates to all users, not just you, and so just like he gave you this freedom, you also must pass on this freedom.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

Amincd 16y ago

Capitalism means non-government intervention in your voluntary agreements and interactions with others. In other words, it's freedom.

_delirium 16y ago
There's a lot of disagreement over that word "voluntary", though. People who emphasize the "capitalism" part, as in anarcho-capitalists, tend to take a very loose view of what constitutes voluntary agreement, which is basically anything short of initiating actual physical violence, or perhaps direct threats like putting a gun to someone's head. Others, from the more left-leaning parts of voluntaryist circles, require a stronger definition of voluntary. The standards of traditional western contract law for what counts as a voluntary agreement (i.e. not one entered into under coercion or duress) are somewhere in between.

Duff 16y ago

Here's what what said about the gold standard to differentiate from Bitcoin: "There was no choice in how one could pay, payments were made in a vacuum. All transactions had to be made in a currency backed by gold. That meant that any abuse of the Standard could affect the economy negatively and runs on banks were almost inevitable." So what? People were and are always free to transact business in any way that they would like, but the coin of the realm that you are required to accept and pay taxes with is/was gold. That doesn't mean that I can't exchange a few bushels of wheat for a goat. Or some coupons for car washes for a sandwich. Or some bitcoin for a webhosting, or whatever you buy with bitcoin. Bitcoin is only against capitalism in the sense that nobody is going to make a significant amount of money from it.

kolinko 16y ago
Saying that "bitcoin means freedom to choose a form of payment" is naive. Let's say that Bitcoin is success, and 98% of internet merchants accept bitcoins as a mean of payment. This will mean that once I open up a shop, I have to accept it as well, or I'll lose sales. Of course, in theory, nobody would force me to accept Bitcoins, but so is the case today - nobody forces me to use Dollars, or PayPal.
- Duff 16y ago
  But again, barring some magical event that entices 98% of merchants to accept Bitcoin, why would you accept it versus gold, silver etc? You still need a middleman to broker the transaction to whatever the legal tender currency is, so why not just exchange shares of GLD or SLV online?
- dpatru 16y ago
  > nobody forces me to use Dollars Actually, if you're in the US, you do have to use dollars. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender#United_States and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Dollar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Dollar.
  - Duff 16y ago