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Richard Stallman was right in the same sense Karl Marx was right. The people would, in fact, be better off if each have according to his abilities, and received
by xyzzyz 4y ago
Richard Stallman was right in the same sense Karl Marx was right. The people would, in fact, be better off if each have according to his abilities, and received according to his needs.
The problem here is the problem of incentives: you can state your desired end goal (prosperous communism, or free software utopia), but there is no mechanism to get there from here, and even if you somehow do get there, no mechanism to preserve that state without all encompassing coercion.
Moreover, the lack of incentives results in lack of prosperity: if there is little incentive to produce a lot (like in capitalism, where your profit grows with volume), people produce just enough to get by, plus some for individual entertainment. I’m sure Guix is good enough for the author’s needs! The problem is to get people to do things that nobody really wants to do. Who will build free software Salesforce? In capitalism, we do that by paying people money to do things they wouldn’t want to do for free. In fact, same is true in free and open source software: I can really only name a handful of projects that are widely used and of high quality that have not been largely funded by commercial world: OpenSSH, some other BSD stuff, what else?
Since commercial businesses want to use these things alongside their proprietary stuff, they necessarily cannot constitute part of pure (in free software sense) distributions. Thus, if you aim for purity, you either end up with shoddy quality, or depend on the largesse of the non-pure activities. This is analogous to modern welfare state, which can only function by skimming the value created by advanced commercial economies, and only to an extent that doesn’t actually choke them altogether.
In short, incentives matter.
- hklgny 4y agoI know it's a silly thing to point out, but I really enjoyed your typo in the second line in the context of that world view being incongruent with reality. We can't even type it as a society.
- biotinker 4y ago> I can really only name a handful of projects that are widely used and of high quality that have not been largely funded by commercial world: OpenSSH, some other BSD stuff, what else? Is this perhaps though a result of most projects allowing donations, and some companies (e.g. Google) having a lot of capital to throw around and funding them more-or-less just because? Would Linux not still exist in a similar form to today? Also, I would add things like the GNU project, and notably VLC media player, alongside OpenSSH and the BSD stuff. I agree with your final point, though. I can't actually think of a company whose product only in-house FOSS software. Red Hat, Suse, Purism, etc are building off community code, not something primarily developed internally. And companies like MongoDB make all of their money off of non-free cloud products. One that I can think of that was once like this, the Subsonic media player, actually went closed source due to too many people re-hosting the code and not paying the maintainer.
- xyzzyz 4y ago> Would Linux not still exist in a similar form to today? Majority of work on Linux is done by people who are paid by their employers to do exactly that. Just look at this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-... Google involved in Linux is mainly not through their donations to Linux Foundation, but through code written by Google employees on the clock.