Open Source capitalists

[Lawrence]

> 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

Right, but despite Carrol Cox's insistence that there is nothing new under
the sun, there does seem something new here. It is old news for companies to
take technologies from universities and then put to them use in commercial
applications. But the company is then in charge of the commercial
application. Here, things are almost reversed. IBM will be taking orders
from others, partly the on-campus crowd that does so much of the work.
Unless IBM can find a way to order students to do just what it wants, it
will have to bend with the on-campus fads. More so, nothing can get into the
Linux Kernel without the approval of Linus Torvaldos, and he is not an IBM
employee. Though that could change in the future, of course.