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If you've read some of the alternative literature on capitalism you might think that profit is by definition providing "unpaid work for other people to exploit

If you've read some of the alternative literature on capitalism you might think that profit is by definition providing "unpaid work for other people to exploit and make lots of of money off of". It's a rather clever inversion of private property rights that exploits the medium of commodity exchange - to pay someone a fixed wage for their commodity called labour time and exploit their produce to turn a profit. Open-source is only an ethical perversion if you believe the above is a just system of compensation. To me the profit motive is a hinderance to progress and innovation as it requires subjugating everything to the need to produce a surplus - often eliminating whole extremely useful areas for human advancement as they are impractical in this regard. Case and point: no one paid Einstein to produce his innovation, he merely took a menial job that gave him time and means to produce it. That being said capitalists have certainly made money off of it - eg, GPS. We should be careful not to conflate the exploitation of innovations with the cause of them.

pnathan 12y ago
Remark: there are different theories of value. I don't buy into what, afaict, is known as the labor theory of value - "profit is by definition providing "unpaid work for other people to exploit and make lots of of money off of"". Oh, other remark - the ethical perversion that MIT/Apache/et al allowed is that billions of dollars are made off those licenses, providing very excellent lifestyles to selected people, and there is no compensation ipso facto to the actual authors outside of (maybe) recognition in license.txt files hidden away on phones. Recognition does not (as a first order effect) help bills get paid (or a better life for author (those might be second order effects)), nor does it help the world in general (except for the product itself). Consider the effects of open source on the economy (positive), and the fact that thousands of people do this for free, enabling companies to essentially get free labor (and then have the gall to want unpaid labor proof in interviews). Stallman approaches this topic grounded as a question of ethics and morals, with an imperative to share information. I approach the topic in three ways: "Am I taking this thought-stuff and making fat cash and not giving anything back to the person who made it?", and "Can the end user repair (or find a repair person) the product I have provided them?", and "If this is a good project, can it be maintained and recovered in thirty years time". I don't think anything but the GPL (and friends) gives that position. You can also say to my position that it's terribly unethical to ask people in each company that wants to do X to do the same project (but duplicated for each company), rather than having an open source project that has liberal licensing and having the engineers share work. Wasting other people's lives is a harsh thing as well. :-)

pnathan 12y ago

Remark: there are different theories of value. I don't buy into what, afaict, is known as the labor theory of value - "profit is by definition providing "unpaid work for other people to exploit and make lots of of money off of"". Oh, other remark - the ethical perversion that MIT/Apache/et al allowed is that billions of dollars are made off those licenses, providing very excellent lifestyles to selected people, and there is no compensation ipso facto to the actual authors outside of (maybe) recognition in license.txt files hidden away on phones. Recognition does not (as a first order effect) help bills get paid (or a better life for author (those might be second order effects)), nor does it help the world in general (except for the product itself). Consider the effects of open source on the economy (positive), and the fact that thousands of people do this for free, enabling companies to essentially get free labor (and then have the gall to want unpaid labor proof in interviews). Stallman approaches this topic grounded as a question of ethics and morals, with an imperative to share information. I approach the topic in three ways: "Am I taking this thought-stuff and making fat cash and not giving anything back to the person who made it?", and "Can the end user repair (or find a repair person) the product I have provided them?", and "If this is a good project, can it be maintained and recovered in thirty years time". I don't think anything but the GPL (and friends) gives that position. You can also say to my position that it's terribly unethical to ask people in each company that wants to do X to do the same project (but duplicated for each company), rather than having an open source project that has liberal licensing and having the engineers share work. Wasting other people's lives is a harsh thing as well. :-)