National Phone in Sick Day?

bor xitwise writes "i dont know if anti-capitalist sentiment and the open source community necessarily go hand in hand (cough), but i thought you might want to mention "world phone in sick day", which is coming up on the 6th of april. hopefully we can get a larger participation in the u.s. this year!! " Thats strange. I wish I wasn't my own company- could use a sick day.

A Reasoned response

Uhh I hate to burst your bubble, but there's more to the world than capitalism and communism. This article makes no mention of communism...it just seems to take a strong stance against capitalism. For all I know these guys could be communists, but it's darn near impossible to tell for sure.

Although (hopefully I won't offend any communists here :P), but this seems like the kind of "cheap-shot" that communists are known to do to bring down capitalism. I agree capitalism is pretty heinous, but organising meaningless "protests" like this just makes things worse. And quite frankly I'd rather have capitalism or whatever the hell this is called than have communism.

And free software isn't necessarily communist-like. Communism was still just an oligarchy trying to control one big-ass nation of far too many people, and being mighty restrictive as well. It was still based on currency and money, but the government had control over it. Money doesn't factor in at all with free software -- communism, socialism, capitalism, feudalism, monarchy, you name it, any political system that's been devised doesn't really lend itself to or away from free software as far as I can see.

What does this have to do with opensource?

What does lying to an employer about one's own health, which is highly unethical in my opinion, have to do with the philosophy of freed software or the desire for opensource?

This isn't anticapitalism. If you don't like your employer, then change jobs. At least in the U.S. this should be easy.

Hey, I have an idea--why not just fudge our billable hours on the sixth? We can all get $50 extra and donate it to worthy causes!

Uggh. Having this sort of thing associated with good things like freed software makes me ill.

Open Source vs. Anti-Capitalism

i dont know if anti-capitalist sentiment and the open source community necessarily go hand in hand (cough)

Where does open source have the slightest connection with anti-capitalist sentiment? Through the head of OSI, Eric S. Raymond, a packin' Libertarian? Is it through RMS, the father of ideological opposition to proprietary software? Read the GNU Manifesto [gnu.org]. Is that a work of anti-capitalism? Is it Linus Torvalds, now working for big bucks in Transmeta, an archetypal example of that icon of contemporary capitalism, the Silicon Valley start-up? Is Larry Wall a Marxist? Is Sendmail, Inc. a front for anarchist agitation?

Some Open Source figures have objections, on principle or on pragmatic grounds, to the intellectual property system. That is NOT a rejection of the right to private property. The very argument that Stallman uses to assert that there is no intellectual property right (at, for example, the "Natural Rights" bulletpoint in his "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" essay), by arguing the contrast between ideas and physical things, implicitly accepts private physical property. (And incidentally, not even RMS argues that operating "intellectual property" systems is wrong in all circumstances).

But I may have somewhat misinterpreted what was meant. There are pockets of anti-capitalist sentiment around the "open-source community": among the old GNU Usenet hangers-on (or so I'm told), and on Slashdot now (as well as loudmouths of opposing persuasions, too). But neither the heavyweight thinkers of free software (eg. Stallman, Raymond, Wall), nor most people who do serious work for it, endorse that sentiment. Let alone do the supporters of the Open Source program! It is after all thanks to the wealth generated by the scarcity economy of capitalism that the "gift economy" of Open Source can exist at all.

A Reasoned response

I realize that some ideas will never die, communism among them. Although in pricincipal, the idea of a communist utopia where everyone is equal must sound quite appealing to many people, many disastrous experiments in other countries have shown that humanity is not ready for such government.

Open Source software may reflect the ideals of communism in as much as authors 'contribute according to their means', and everyone is free to 'take what they need', in the truest spirit of communism.

However, software is nothing without hardware to run on. We have seen how every (so-called) communist regime has failed at providing goods and services to its people. What communist government is capable of achieving the 50% household penetration of computers that we currently see in the United States and similar free-market based economies?

Secondly, open source software is about choice. Open source software is the antithesis of monopolies like Microsoft, which control the source code. Well, the communist party has a monopoly on power (we have yet to see any democratic communist countries, the true communist ideal, and likely never will for many years to come). A communist government would be very unlikely to resist trying to control the future of software development. Do you want to be told what to program, when and why?

A truly free market will allow people to contribute what they like to software community, and to exploit their work for profit. It will resist controls put on it by communist and monopolistic dictatorships.

I read the article calling for the 'sick-out', and find that perhaps it shouldn't be taken so seriously. However, my curiousity was piqued when the submitter of this story made a relationship between communism and open source, and I felt it necessary to respond.

http://www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/declaration/ declaration.html