Open Source capitalists

[Kelley]

At 11:37 AM 8/28/01 -0400, ravi wrote:
>Michael Perelman wrote:
>
>>In part, the open source movement reminds me of students setting 
>>internships.  You
>>work for nothing, in part, for some very good reasons, but also as a form 
>>of a
>>tryout for commercial employment.  If you develop a good reputation 
>>within the
>>open source movement, you have an entree to a good job in the commercial 
>>sector.
>
>
>i am not sure i agree with you entirely. sure, many of the simple user
>applications built on the X windows system were written by grad students
>and novice programmers (and X itself came out of academic projects at
>mit and other places), but in my memory, most open source software (and
>here i am not differentiating between FSF software and the newer open
>source efforts) ranging from GNU's sophisticated compilers to larry
>wall's perl were written by either professionals in the industry or it
>was written more out of interest, than motivated by the possibility of
>employment as a result. take eric allman who wrote the complex sendmail
>program that still manages many email gateways on the internet - i
>believe he has since founded or joined a company that sells this
>software as a product, but i doubt he had such employment considerations
>in mind when he wrote the original code. larry wall, to give another
>example, was employed (at one of the baby bells if i remember) when he
>first released perl.

it was eric raymond, or esr, who developed sendmail.

secondly, i think m.p. was making an analogy, an imperfect one, of course.

while there is a manifest function, as the functionalists would say, there 
is also a latent function: academia provides research and development that 
will later be exploited by capital.  i think the analogy is probably only 
flawed because you're using examples mainly from the earliest points in the 
development of the professions. as the profession becomes more 
rationalized, i'd suspect that michael is probably more likely accurate. 
while there are always people who do it for the joy of doing it, it's 
success on a capitalist scale depends on deploying that energy in a way 
that ensures that the dead body of labor line the pockets of capital.

kelley