Linux guru Raymond accused of 'vulgar Marxism'

Johannes Schneider Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net
Fri Oct 15 06:49:49 PDT 1999


From: David Jennings wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Oct 1999, Johannes Schneider wrote:
>
> >For all the adherents of Open Source and vulgar Marxism:
> >>>From The Register:
> >
> >'In an ill-tempered article Nikolai Bezroukov has mounted a personal
attack
> >on Eric Raymond, author of The cathedral and the bazaar and well-known
Linux
> >luminary. Raymond is accused of promoting "an over-optimistic and
simplistic
> >view of open source, as a variant of socialist (or to be more exact,
vulgar
> >Marxist) interpretation of software development". '
>
>
> I don't know what it means, but Raymond is a gun nut too, as evidenced by
> his so-called writings:
>
> http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings
>
> I've always found the notion that Linux/Open Source is revolutionary a bit
> silly.
I agree with you. Raymond is a outspoken advocate of market capitalism. In his reply to Bezroukov he wrote:

_begin quote:_ There are many sins of which I can reasonably be accused, but the imputation of "vulgar Marxism" won't stand up to even a casual reading of my papers. In CatB, I analogize open-source development to a free market in Adam Smith's sense and use the terminology of classical (capitalist) economics to describe it. In HtN I advance an argument for the biological groundedness of property rights and cite Ayn Rand approvingly on the dangers of altruism. And the entire body of tMC develops the thesis that open-source development and the post-industrial capitalism of the Information Age are natural allies.

In fact, I find the imputation of Marxism deeply and personally offensive as well as untrue. While I have made a point of not gratuitously waving my politics around in my papers, it is no secret in the open-source world that I am a libertarian, a friend of the free market, and implacably hostile to all forms of Marxism and socialism (which I regard as coequal in evil with Naziism). _end quote_ Full text at: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/response-to-bezroukov.html So the struggle between M$ and Linux is not between capitalism and socialism, but between two different apologetics of capitalist society. Johannes



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