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The strangest bit of this article for me was the choice of RMS as an example of profiting from open source. And the evidence of that is that he's not homeless a
by sethev 13y ago
The strangest bit of this article for me was the choice of RMS as an example of profiting from open source. And the evidence of that is that he's not homeless and he hasn't died of starvation. By that logic wait-staff at the Waffle House are also enriching themselves.
- steveklabnik 13y ago> By that logic wait-staff at the Waffle House are also enriching themselves. I think you're missing the point very slightly. The point is not that RMS is living the high life; the logic goes like this: 1. FOSS is unpaid labor. 2. RMS only works on Free software. 3. Money is needed to live. 4. RMS is alive 5. Contradiction: RMS must make money somehow, therefore, FOSS is not entirely unpaid. Note that this works for the Waffle House as well, but there's no contradiction, as their waged labor is obviously paid, so Step 1 is different. I don't think that many people here would disagree with this, 'social capital' is a pretty well-understood concept.
- lambda 13y agoI don't know who really still believes that FOSS is unpaid labor. It is generally paid in the form of better jobs available based on your record, paid support, being paid to do it incidentally as part of your job, or even being paid directly to work on it. So, pointing out that FOSS is paid labor is basically just attacking a strawman. I suppose that a few people seem to be mistaken in thinking that their FOSS work is unpaid, despite all of the economic benefits they derive from it (like DHH recently), but I don't think that this perception is particularly widespread or really very harmful.
- steveklabnik 13y ago> pointing out that FOSS is paid labor is basically just attacking a strawman. I would agree with you if that was the entire attack, but it's not. The article isn't making an attack. The point is that it's important to think about _who_ has access to social capital, and _who_ can produce social capital.
- lambda 13y agoOK, so the FOSS community consists primarily of people in already privileged groups (white English speaking men), and they are best suited to be able to take advantage of it. So, what's to be done? Is the solution to give up on FOSS? That's what this article seems to be arguing: "All it has done is shift the details and, indeed, done a much better job of disguising its exploitation of people. All while presenting itself as a ‘solution’." The article seems to argue that FOSS actually causes more oppression than it solves, and I have a hard time buying that. One thing that it completely ignores is class distinctions. One of the things that FOSS allows is for anyone to produce a product without substantial investment of capital. Proprietary software is an owner's dream; invest a small amount upfront in developer's salary, and be able to reap unbounded rewards, as there is no unit cost for sales. FOSS allows anyone, without capital upfront, to create a competitive business, opening up opportunities that wouldn't otherwise exist for people who are middle and lower class. Now, those benefits can be most easily reaped by people who have social capital in the community. But it seems that rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it would be better to figure out why there are such barriers to entry to people who are underrepresented in the community. While there are some cases where there are clearly people pushing others away, I feel like there's a lot more of simply a lack of awareness of what it is that is keeping people from joining and contributing to the community, and being able to build up social capital that way.
- steveklabnik 13y agoI don't think this article attempts to provide solutions, only to 'add framing' to the problem. > One of the things that FOSS allows is for anyone to produce a product without substantial investment of capital. Absolutely! This is actually very in line with Marx's thinking. After reading your last paragraph, I think your issue is that you want more than the article is attempting to give. I agree, we absolutely need these kinds of answers. I just don't think that it was ever intended to be presented here.
- lambda 13y agoWell, I think the article is explicitly going in the wrong direction, criticizing the basic idea of FOSS for causing these problems. The article seems to claim that because FOSS relies on labor that is unpaid upfront but rewarded by social capital, that it is inherently going to produce worse outcomes for less privileged groups. And I don't buy that. So it's not just that I want more than the article gives (though I want that too; I would prefer that more potential solutions were presented), I'm also uncomfortable with the way it's framing the debate, indicating that this is an inherent failure in the FOSS model as opposed to a bug that should be fixed.
- sethev 13y agoYeah, I understood the argument but unless RMS claimed never to have benefited directly or indirectly from his activities, I'm not sure why it's worth pointing out. In other words it's only a contradiction if he claimed premise 1 is true. Otherwise it's just a misunderstanding of FOSS. In any case that's definitely not the main point of the article - just an example of sloppy reasoning that struck me on reading it, which doesn't necessarily invalidate the whole.
- steveklabnik 13y agoRecent articles have asserted that there's no material gain for those who work for free. You and the author both agree that that's not true.
- lukaseder 13y agoIt may be worth mentioning that RMS is really far from homeless or starvation: http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N59/59stallman.59n.html http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N59/59stallman.59n.html
- sethev 13y agoYeah, that might have been an interesting point for the author to make had she bothered to do any research.