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"And one of the ideas was that they wouldn't get outside investors, because outside investors would insist on imposing all the usual ways of doing things that w
by mjolk 13y ago
"And one of the ideas was that they wouldn't get outside investors, because outside investors would insist on imposing all the usual ways of doing things that would make it ugly."
To me, this is really amusing to read on hacker news, given the rosy lenses we put on when it comes to getting a startup running from venture capital. I would go as far to say that most of us are building the business and enabling this kind of management/carrot-holding types to continue their behaviors.
- stelonix 13y agoAlthough this is true, I believe HN has two audiences: the startup people and tech people. The former are the guys posting about VC, "How (not) to fire someone", "How to choose a cofounder", postmortems, etc. The other group are more like tech people who use HN as a tech/programming hub, much like Slashdot or /r/programming. That second group is probably more aligned with RMS's world view, while the startup guys are mostly interested in the business side of things. So basically, there are both people who enjoy this kind of thought and people who vehemently oppose it on HN. We can see it easily in HN's comments.
- mjolk 13y ago>Although this is true, I believe HN has two audiences: the startup people and tech people. That's fair. I have this romantic view that there's a brand of ethical/hacker startup, but that's, of course, without data to back up that not everything goes to shit when you have demands for meteoric growth.
- generj 13y ago"meteoric growth" sounds about right for most startups, since they fail. http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/meteoric.html http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/meteoric.html
- zeckalpha 13y agoThere's also the bootstrappers, who would also be aligned with this aspect of RMS' world view, though not likely other aspects.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoThere's a third audience, those people who think capitalism and socialism each have their pros and cons. It's larger than you think: since we find the for/against VC/RMS debates rather tiresome and fruitless, except for the purpose of clarifying our own world views, we don't end up saying much.
- pfraze 13y agoThe Hacker ethos isn't socialist by the modern definition (government-run/public services). It's more about keeping business decisions from affecting quality of engineering and user rights. That doesn't mean capitalism can't happen - or socialism for that matter - it just means there's ethical requirements which take priority.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoCopyleft seeks to ensure public ownership of the means of production.
- spacelizard 13y agoNo, copyleft is fairly neutral and just seeks to mitigate some of the damage done by copyright. Copyright is what has the serious political agenda, not copyleft.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoownership : means of production :: source code : binaries
- spacelizard 13y agoThat analogy doesn't make any sense because computer software is not produced in factories. Plus, the idea of copyleft is that software shouldn't have owners, period.
- oo 13y agoWho are GNU's competitors? I don't see one. If all you want to do is charity work, you may not need to borrow money from investors. But if you need to build something fast/good enough to compete with fierce competitors, you do need the money. If you don't, your competitors will.