--- Chuck0 <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> More people over the course of the past decade have
> compared open source
> software to anarchism than they have to Marxism.
> There was more writing
> about this about 4-5 years ago. I should try digging
> out some of the
> articles. Richard Stallman, the creator and
> spokesperson of the GNU free
> software movement, is probably an anarchist.
....
>
> I'd love to write a book about this, but I've got my
> hands full right
> now with three other books.
Here's a slightly overwrought slice by the Free Software Foundation's attorney:
<http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/anarchism.html>
Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright
....Why do people make free software if they don't get to profit? Two answers have usually been given. One is half-right and the other is wrong, but both are insufficiently simple.
The wrong answer is embedded in numerous references to "the hacker gift-exchange culture." This use of ethnographic jargon wandered into the field some years ago and became rapidly, if misleadingly, ubiquitous. It reminds us only that the economeretricians have so corrupted our thought processes that any form of non-market economic behavior seems equal to every other kind. But gift-exchange, like market barter, is a propertarian institution. Reciprocity is central to these symbolic enactments of mutual dependence, and if either the yams or the fish are short-weighted, trouble results. Free software, at the risk of repetition, is a commons: no reciprocity ritual is enacted there. A few people give away code that others sell, use, change, or borrow wholesale to lift out parts for something else. Notwithstanding the very large number of people (tens of thousands, at most) who have contributed to GNU/Linux, this is orders of magnitude less than the number of users who make no contribution whatever [27].
A part of the right answer is suggested by the claim that free software is made by those who seek reputational compensation for their activity. Famous Linux hackers, the theory is, are known all over the planet as programming deities. From this they derive either enhanced self-esteem or indirect material advancement [28]. But the programming deities, much as they have contributed to free software, have not done the bulk of the work. Reputations, as Linus Torvalds himself has often pointed out, are made by willingly acknowledging that it was all done by someone else. And, as many observers have noted, the free software movement has also produced superlative documentation. Documentation-writing is not what hackers do to attain cool, and much of the documentation has been written by people who didn't write the code....
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