Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
> Free software out of passion - or, the curse of capitalism
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| In his assertion, there is an implicit assumption that anything not
| done for money is done from boredom.
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This is entirely reverse logic. I've always been considerably more bored
when working to someone else's agenda than when working to my own. I
think the vast majority of people would associate "work" with (at the
very least) drudgery, if not flat-out boredom, and would be more
inclined to describe their *free* time as enjoyable. Perhaps not every
*minute* of it, but a considerably larger proportion than their *work*
time, anyway.
Then there's the question of "productivity"; should all goals ultimately
be about money? I find that concept repugnant in the extreme. IMHO FOSS
is coincidental to capitalism, it neither challenges it nor promotes it,
it is simply there for anyone to use or ignore as they wish.
My financial motives are driven by other's financial motives, which is
simply another way of saying that one cannot live in a capitalist
society without being tainted by it. I do whatever I need to in order to
survive, but here's the rub, some people seem to have confused survival
with domination, need with greed, capitalism with fascism, development
with expansionism, competition with warfare, productivity with slavery,
and creativity with property. The product of modern-day capitalism is
handcuffs, and cheap plastic handcuffs at that. Even more ironically, if
the "customer" then frees himself from those plastic handcuffs, he's
accused of circumvention. If he makes another, more useful, tool from
the recycled plastic, he's accused of infringement.
We live in a very sick world.
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| Economics is not the only driving force in the world. Not everything
| can be evaluated in terms of economics. The need for fulfillment that
| drives people to design and code free software is not always economic
| in nature, and so falls outside any economic model. As communism and
| capitalism are both economic models, they cannot be applied to free
| software developers, any more than they can be applied to an avid
| gardener, or someone who writes poetry and hides it away in their
| desk.
`----
The goal of capitalism is the obsessive pursuit of money, at the expense
of all else. I have different priorities. I live in a capitalist
society, and as such I have to abide by it's rules, so I play the game,
but I seek cooperation ... not annihilation. Like most people, I enjoy
what I can, and endure what I must, but my patience with the injustices
of greed can only stretch so far, which is what motivates me to expose
those injustices and advocate freedom. I earn and invest money to live
in the world, not to dominate it. I use and develop Free software
because I believe in that liberty, not because I seek to control others
and extort from them. If only the corrupt forces of corporate society
would extend the same courtesy to me, but that is highly improbable ...
it simply isn't in their nature. There's no profit in kindness.
--
K.
http://slated.org
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| 'Also, no one calls it PCI-X even though that's the "official "
| shortening of the much more commonly used "PCI Express".'
| - Hardon Quirk, COLA's resident "genius".
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Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux) on sky, running kernel 2.6.20-1.2312.fc5
22:18:00 up 32 days, 19:50, 0 users, load average: 0.13, 0.16, 0.17
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