4 ms·

Marxists would argue that naive is exactly what you were, and Marxists would reference history both to show you why and what you could have done about it. Liber

• sramsay 5y ago
  No argument from me at all. Just a bit of sadness.
  • teknopaul 5y ago
    If you help granny cross the road, are you better off getting paid?
    • morelisp 5y ago
      Spare a dime for poor Larry and Sergey?
• goodpoint 5y ago
  Care to explain what should have been done? Also, what were people naive about?
  • eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Not GP, but if I extend the “marxists warned” logic, what could have been done would be to own the means of production. In this case, as with a lot of other Marxist analysis, that means taking a different view of what freedom entails, tying permission to exploit labor to a commitment to serving that labor and sharing its spoils. To some extent later GNU licensing reflects similar thinking. I think what was naive was building OSS around service, support and consulting. Instead it could have been built around mutual benefit as a governing principle.
    • morelisp 5y ago
      See also https://www.boundary2.org/2018/07/mueller/ https://www.boundary2.org/2018/07/mueller/ Stallman (and others e.g. Lessig) had clear visions of where they wanted to be but were thoroughly stuck in an end-of-history mindset - "we'll do the work to get this small part of society from A to B, and then we'll be at B." Well, no, then someone is going to drag parts back to A, and another is going to drag a few over to C, and after a few steps of this your rhetoric around digital freedom is going to be half fueling the propaganda of the largest, most powerful corporations in American history, and half the weak intellectual justification for a right-wing populist riot.
      • dmfb 5y ago
        Awesome article!!! So glad I posted this comment and you replied. This article seriously rules!
        • morelisp 5y ago
          Then you might also appreciate the other two entries in the trifecta of leftist writing about SV that usually get me greyed out: https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozo... https://www.e-flux.com/journal/70/60567/the-vectoralist-class-part-ii/ https://www.e-flux.com/journal/70/60567/the-vectoralist-clas...
    • dTal 5y ago
      >I think what was naive was building OSS around service, support and consulting. Instead it could have been built around mutual benefit as a governing principle. Free software was built around the principles of mutual benefit. OSS was coined as a "corporate friendly" label, and it is from that culture that the whole service and consulting thing comes. Service, support and consulting is how you make money from it. It wasn't naive at all - it was a cynical co-opting. (And if you don't see the problem with the maintainers of a piece of software to also charge for support, may I direct your attention to The Shirky Principle [0] - "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution". Software developed under this model will, over time, become byzantine, baroque, and frustrating - because that brings in the consulting cash.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky#Shirky_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky#Shirky_principle