Re: [ox-en] Germ of a new form of society or germ of a new form of business?
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2004 23:33:31 +0100
Hi Martin, Niall, list!
Last month (45 days ago) Niall Douglas wrote:
On 10 Dec 2003 at 6:52, Martin Hardie wrote:
I was attracted to Stefan Merten's writings in part because of his
characterisation of things p2p as a germ of a new form of society.
However I am find that many people here - or my impression; talk or
are more interested in a germ of a new way of doing business or a new
business model.
I strongly disagree with the former. I am here for the latter. See my
first post to this list some weeks ago.
As you can see, Martin, people here are interested in quite different
things ;-) . And people on the (still bigger) German of the project
again are interested in different things. Indeed there are noticeable
differences in the English and German discussion - which is obvious
given the fact that active people differ for the most part.
Are both of these the "Oekonux way"?
Are they the same thing?
Well, as Oekonux is mainly an analysis - what the hell is going on? -
and theory project - how we can explain what we witness? - it is a
totally legitimate assumption that Free Software is *only* a new way
of making business.
However, I can see really very little substance to this assumption.
Niall in particular is busy in pointing out how the GPL stops people
from making money (buy selling the work of other people). In fact
there is little practical evidence that making business with Free
Software *as such* does lead anywhere to any substantial degree.
Put it this way - not one single book I've read explains properly how
a set of disjunct geographically & culturally disparate engineers can
generate large complex engineering projects with no management
whatsoever - especially with no financial return. We all know it
works, but /why/ it works and even more importantly *how* it works is
the key to a superior paradigm of production.
Indeed, this is a typical Oekonux question :-) . However, I think we
found some interesting answers to this. Of course these answers don't
work when you treat capitalist thinking as sacred.
In capitalist terms Free Software more or less can not be explained. A
strong hint to the fact that capitalist terms are indeed an ideology
which becomes outdated.
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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