On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 20:14 -0600, Josh Coates wrote: > i think there are some parallels to the OSS/proprietary software debate and > political/economic systems, but i'm not sure you have them matched up > correctly. you'd have to expand on your reasons to convince me that OSS is > more like capitalism and closed source is more like communism.
Communist Russia was a centralized command economy with some token "competition". That's how I feel about proprietary software. I give the company (govt.) my money, then sit back and hope like crazy that they care about the same things I do. If it turns out instead that a manager's son-in-law's uncle would get richer by using my money to add a feature I don't need or want, hey what are customers (citizens) for if not to be taken advantage of? Found a bug? Best of luck convincing some low-level phone jockey (local party representative) that it actually matters to the company. If I'd been using OSS (capitalism), I could have just solved the problem myself, calling on the help of other users (investors) if I needed it. Don't point at my argument and say "you're wrong because proprietary software is still subject to competition". You know as well as I do that its often cheaper to live with problems than experience the disruption and delays of switching to a competing solution. You might have had the chioce of moving to communist russia or not, but good luck getting out. F/OSS expands and intensifies competition significantly with less wastefull duplication of effort. Look at a X.org. XFree86 was unresponsive and moving in the wrong direction, so X.org was created. Instead of starting from scratch, they could just build on XFree's previous work. Disruption to users? Almost non-existent. Bad for XFree86? Obviously, but they're the one's that mis-stepped. Good for users? Undeniably. > i mean, in a very simple way, if you just take the private property rights > argument, then closed source is much more like capitalism, and open source > is much more like socialism - though i think this view may be over > simplified. Very much over simplified. That's why I don't like the old "OSS is communism" declarations. The issues are too complex. Just wanted to point out that the argument goes the other way too. -- Stuart Jansen e-mail/jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] "XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using enough of it." - Chris Maden
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