> so, how is it a challenge to capitalism and not just an adjustment within
> capitalism? i'm happy to learn how so, but no one has explained how you
> would ditch the current economy and replace it with a FOSS based one.
Whoever claimed it was a "challenge to capitalism"? I would indeed never argue that it is anything more than a minor adjustment to capitalism. If anything I have written suggests otherwise, then I didn't chose my words properly.
On 2/1/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> What's the big deal about open source in this case? MySQL Enterprise
> Platinum goes for $4,995 per server per year. Which may be a
> reasonable price, I dunno. But it sure sounds like capitalist social
> relations to me. Even the low-end price, $595, ain't cheap.
The low-end price is not $595, it is FREE, as I pointed out in the OP. I for one have never made claims about open source changing "capitalist social relations". That said, "free" doesn't leave much room for surplus value etc.
> 1) It
> typically presupposes high levels of expertise in users. Cf. Joanna's
> example of her daughter surfing the web within 10 minutes of her
> taking it out of the box.
In some cases yes, in others no. Does it require technical expertise to download Firefox, open source software par excellence? Nope. If the iMac Joanna had bought for her daughter had come pre-installed with Ubuntu or one of the other geek-lite distros, the girl would have been online just as quickly. (If I wanted to be snide, I would point out that OS X installed on that iMac is built from the ground up on open-source. Might that have something to do with its quality?)
> 2) FOSS relies heavily on free riding on
> the resources of employers (and parents, as has, nonjokingly, been
> pointed out). People cannot pay the rent trading code, nor can they
> pay for the computers and Internet connections necessary to develop
> and distribute it.
It relies equally heavily on investments by companies like IBM, Novell, Sun, Red Hat etc who have full-time developers working on open-source projects. Last time I looked, the Firefox foundation had annual revenues on the order of 35 million (mostly search engine kickback from Google) with which it funds a team of programmers.
> 3) How can the model be translated into the production
> and exchange of peaches, health care, or transportation?
Who claimed it could? I specifically stated otherwise, in reference to WalMart. I realize you may responding to something written by someone else, but I've never seen such exorbitant claims. Just who is exactly is making them? This is a sincere question.
> People in
> the computer world have a really exaggerated idea of the size of the
> sector. It's actually rather small.
Indeed. And within this rather small world, open-source is, IMO, an interesting phenomenon, nothing more, nothing less, not least for the *potential* threat it poses to Microsoft, which is very big, very powerful, and rather unpopular.