Privatisation of FLOSS? was: Re: [ox-en] GPL Restrictive (and all the rest of those threads that this grew out of)
- From: CC <cc riseup.net>
- Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2003 15:41:21 -0800
Hi
On Sat, 15 Nov 2003, Martin Hardie wrote:
But at first glance there are 2 threads here I think
OK, it's the first one that I can't get my head around:
- the privatisation of FLOSS and the method/mode of
producton/oganisation (my worse case scenario) and
I really don't see how this can be done, it is hard to see how capital
could take control of all existing code and force it's development to
only be done by employees.
Perhaps Apple's OSX is the best example of capital taking a free OS and
then turning it into a commodity -- is this the kind of thing you
envisage? Apple has given some code back to the community.
I can't see how a more primative mode of production can take over a
more advanced one, how would this look exactly?
- The not the worst case scenario is that capital continues to adopt
the rhizomaticmethid/mode as it allows them to avoid the problems of
wage labourers... no salaries, no benefits, no workers compensation -
just a pool of labour hapily producing commodities at no/low cost.
OK there are two distinct issues here:
1. "No salaries, no benefits, no workers compensation" -- but also no
complulsion and no reason to do this work unless people want to...
My feeling is that there are many people that end up being paid
directly or indirectly to work on free software, people that use it
for their job get drwan into submitting bug reports and then patches
in their work time and things like this in additon people being paid
directly to code free software.
However I do think that if and when more sectors in society adopt
this mode of production there will be a necessity to make things like
fool, clothing, transport and shelter free in order for it not to be
held back.
2. "A pool of labour hapily producing commodities at no/low cost" -- but
they are not producing commodities :-)
A linux distro has next to zero exchange value, it's just the cost of
burning some CDs, nobody is unhappy that you can get cheap Linux CDs,
in fact one of the key reasons for Fedora using the name Fedora is to
make it easy for anyone to set up shop selling Fedora CDs.
But as a dispute between capitalists how can people imagine the SCO/Msoft
argument that the GPL is anti competitive - this is one thing I have been
trying to flush out here. Looking at it in this way may be helpful.
I really don't know and I'm not sure if they know what arguments they
are going to use yet. Does anyone have any idea when the first hearing
could be?
CC
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