[Gllug] Handing out flyers this Saturday for the Installfest.

[Rev Simon Rumble]

On Fri 14 Feb, Richard Cottrill bloviated thus:

> Politically, Linux, GNU, and Free software in general,
> have a distinctly left-wing world view (access/equality for all, communal
> reward for individual effort, etc).

You're confusing "helping others" with political ideology.  There's nothing
in libertarian ideology which stops people helping each other.  It's just
not built into the systems they build.

Just ask Eric S Raymond.

This is actually something that has gone around and around a few times.
I wrote about it some time ago, in fact:

http://www.rumble.net/blog/index.cgi/1999/07/06#geek/linuxcommies

My own feeling is that Free Software is more of an anarcho-syndicalist
enterprise.  Communism is generally used as a disparaging term by yanks,
and besides which it involves centralised control, which certainly isn't
the way of free software.

Of course the difference between hardcore libertarians and hardcore anarchists
is generally just the side of politics from which they came.  Anarchists
used to be lefties, libertarians used to be righties.

> The "socialist Free software" argument seems so ridiculously self-evident to
> me that anyone who disagrees should have some very strong evidence (not "it
> makes good commercial sense" (misses the point completely); nor "I'm not a
> hippy" (also misses the point - I'm talking abstract politics here)).

Socialism is definitely the wrong analogy.  Socialism requires enforced
taxation: everyone must contribute.  Free software just doesn't work like
that.

-- 
Rev Simon Rumble <simon at rumble.net>
www.rumble.net
Send email with subject "send key pub" for public key.

 "A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should
  be done for the first time."
- Alfred E Wiggam
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