>>I'm not convinced that the free software
>>thing is really that serious an alternative economic model - it
>>involves lots of free riding on the resources of parents and
>>employers, no? - how, can the free exchange of code deal with a world
>>where we still have to use cash money to eat and secure shelter?
>
>As far as I can tell, this argument reduces to the obvious observation
>that the US economy doesn't seriously compensate for producers working
>outside the system.
>
>Well, isn't that the whole issue?
free software isn't produced outside the system. it is thoroughly embedded in it because it depends on parents and employers to support free labor (put clothes on its back, roof over head, and bread and beer on their table).
there is not "outside" the system, any more than "unpaid" wives and mothers were outside the system when they taught children to tie their shoes, play nice with others, read; inculcated moral values; dispensed foot rubs, back rubs, meals, made beds and clean clothes so their worker-husbands could go to work the next day; and volunteered at schools and charities and churches. As researchers who've studied both schools and voluntary organizations have noted, when white and middle class women started going to work and were no longer available to do these things, those institutions were affected and had to adjust accordingly.
The problem with FOSS evangelism is that it doesn't have much of a theory as to *why* people would voluntarily work like this. Right now, you have a status system and a "movement" that inculcates inductees into true believers who sacrifice for the greater good. How would you reproduce such a thing on a grand scale?
One giant Slashdot in the Sky? (and please, spare me with assumptions. you can go to a VIP open source publication and read the columns I wrote last year, and see my editorial genius in a number of articles on -- garshes -- FOSS! Speaking of: this would be why FOSS evangelists and people with disabilities had some 'issues' a couple of years ago in Massachusetts. Somehowerother, FOSS was just as shitty at responding to the needs of disabled users as Bill Gates. Hell, even listening to those users without freakin' sneering at their "ignorance".)
The other problem is that, just as with the free as in beer media players, it obscures the true source of revenue generation. People fancy that it is free, but they are paying for it with The Bake Your Own Bread and Circuses New (*pifffffffft*) Economy. (excuse my Stallmanesque performance there). The whole point for the BYOB&C model is that, as with software, it's hard to make money the old fashioned way -- paying directly for a subscription -- so you make it mainly via advertising. this has largely been the case with print magazines and newspapers for years now anyway. The big difference is that, in order to truly make a profit, the content generation is provided by users: they con users into do the labor that would otherwise have to be paid for.
In turn, they make money on advertisement and the collection of user data and social networking data, which is hugely valuable information.
FOSS does the same thing now, by dismissing the very political economy which makes it possible to begin with, conflating it's particular production process (a particular subset of the social relations of production) with the larger political economy within which it resides
And that's one thing Marx never did: he was, in fact, tres excellent for his very ability to make us see that the system produces it's own contradictions: thus, change isn't "outside" the system.