5 ms·

Although 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"

Although 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 ago
There's also the bootstrappers, who would also be aligned with this aspect of RMS' world view, though not likely other aspects.
foobarbazqux 13y ago
There'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 ago
  The 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 ago
    Copyleft seeks to ensure public ownership of the means of production.
    - spacelizard 13y ago
      No, 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 ago
        ownership : means of production :: source code : binaries
        spacelizard 13y ago
        That 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.
        foobarbazqux 13y ago
        You didn't get the analogy, but I was being extremely terse, so I apologize. Your computer is the factory. The binaries running on your computer are the means of production. You use your factory to do office work, for example writing documents, whatever. Copyleft is all about protecting the user that is running the binaries. Now, if you control the source code to your computer, you control the binaries. This means that you control (own) the means of production, as far as a binary can be owned. However, if you don't have the source code, I can sell you binaries but you have no mechanism to control your own means of production. Really, you haven't bought the software from me, you have bought a license to use it. It's as if you work in a factory, and you have to pay someone else for the privilege to use the machines in it. Copyleft makes source code public among its recipients, meaning that control / ownership is shared, and you can still do what you want on your own machine. Copyleft depends on copyright law to ensure public ownership; if all RMS wanted was a lack of ownership, as opposed to public ownership, he would promote public domain and BSD code. Note that at no point here have I said that public ownership is bad - there are cases where it makes a lot of sense - but I do believe its not helpful to deny that the model is fundamentally socialist, as opposed to the EULA model which is fundamentally capitalist.

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 ago

There's also the bootstrappers, who would also be aligned with this aspect of RMS' world view, though not likely other aspects.

foobarbazqux 13y ago

There'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 ago
The 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 ago
  Copyleft seeks to ensure public ownership of the means of production.
  - spacelizard 13y ago
    No, 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 ago
      ownership : means of production :: source code : binaries
      - spacelizard 13y ago
        That 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.
        foobarbazqux 13y ago
        You didn't get the analogy, but I was being extremely terse, so I apologize. Your computer is the factory. The binaries running on your computer are the means of production. You use your factory to do office work, for example writing documents, whatever. Copyleft is all about protecting the user that is running the binaries. Now, if you control the source code to your computer, you control the binaries. This means that you control (own) the means of production, as far as a binary can be owned. However, if you don't have the source code, I can sell you binaries but you have no mechanism to control your own means of production. Really, you haven't bought the software from me, you have bought a license to use it. It's as if you work in a factory, and you have to pay someone else for the privilege to use the machines in it. Copyleft makes source code public among its recipients, meaning that control / ownership is shared, and you can still do what you want on your own machine. Copyleft depends on copyright law to ensure public ownership; if all RMS wanted was a lack of ownership, as opposed to public ownership, he would promote public domain and BSD code. Note that at no point here have I said that public ownership is bad - there are cases where it makes a lot of sense - but I do believe its not helpful to deny that the model is fundamentally socialist, as opposed to the EULA model which is fundamentally capitalist.