On Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:25:40 -0600, "Marco Peereboom" <[email protected]> said:
> If hippies came up with a good idea I'll be more than happy to run > with it. Sure I disagree with their life style, pretty sure I do that > for the vast majority of the planet. They aren't special and at least > they created something for me to play with. In case you've failed to understand this: I am not against "hippies", I am against government force. Most large FLOSS projects benefit from it to some degree. I don't care what anyone's "life style" is, just as long as they don't initiate aggression against others, like my friends who are currently sitting in prison for tax resistance. It doesn't matter which part of it goes to bombs and which part of it goes to attain control of academia and create an illusion of benevolence, like by funding R&D at Berkeley - you can't have one without the other. Copyfree projects don't rely on the government to force their rules on downstream reflections of their work, which is very important, but unfortunately the perception is that they're disproportionately more likely to get "public" research grants, etc. My attitude on that has always been that "it's perfectly fine to eat your enemy's lunch, just as long as it isn't poisoned", but some of my friends disagree - even one drop of blood can really ruin a person's appetite. (By "enemy" I mean any coercive monopoly, aka government, and not any voluntary market player like Microsoft, which cannot possibly ever become a monopoly. You can RTFM on Anarcho-Capitalist economic theory elsewhere.) Much of this perception is overblown, and some of it is indeed related to the irrational clinging to the name Berkeley. I see FLOSS software as a natural market phenomenon that emerges as the result of some developers' voluntary desire to put utility ahead of monetization, as hyper-competition eventually drives most prices down to zero anyway. There are many libertarian ideas on how to make money while working on FLOSS software (ex. "time-limited hybrid source"). FLOSS requires no government coercion, and for the most part it has been voluntary. Why de-emphasize the large and growing part of this project that's been voluntary and not paid for by the state? > As an OpenBSD developer I can tell you that our community is a whole > bunch of people that are in it for very different reasons. They range > from kumbaya to money to good ol' paranoia. Any one person's views > are completely irrelevant. It is a put up or shut up community. That's all very good, but this is advocacy@ - not misc@, etc. As a person who advocates the use of OpenBSD in certain circles, I came here to express an opinion related precisely to that, and to see if anyone agreed with me. If no one here sees my point, well, that too is a useful outcome of this conversation. It's nice to get things out in the... "open". I'm not going to waste any time exchanging insults or getting sidetracked. I continue to be a very big fan of OpenBSD, and I will contribute to it in whatever ways that I can in due time. IMHO this project would be easier to advocate (and also more fun) if there was an informal joke that BSD stands for the Blowfish Software Distribution, or whatever else. IMHO. I've made my point. Over and out.
