From: Alex F. Bokov (alexboko@umich.edu)
Date: Tue Jun 19 2001 - 11:36:48 MDT
Samantha:
Excellent way of putting it, I hope everybody reads what you wrote before
adding to this thread. Thank you, and be warned that I just might steal
your post and re-use it for my own purposes. :-)
Felix:
> Otherwise we'll be doomed to a life as the self-supporting farmer on
> the open commons of computation.
I don't know why it would be so bad to be a self-supporting
info-farmer.
Anyway, many of your other objections have already been addressed by
ESR. If reading him doesn't change your mind, it will at least help
you make your case stronger by getting rid of the arguments that he
has already repeatedly debunked. http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/
Mike:
Stallman has been widely criticized *within* the open source community
by those of us who like making money. For an alternate take on the
matter, I refer you to ESR.
http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/
Everybody:
1. Once and for all, open content IS capitalist. It just requires a
different business model for intellectual goods than for physical ones
and those too inflexible to adapt deserve to be driven out of
business. Get your brains of the steel-and-diesel age for chrissakes,
you are transhumanists! Did you really think we'd have nanotopia,
uploads, AI, space travel, life-extension, BUT THE FREE MARKET
PARADIGM WOULD REMAIN UNTOUCHED, HAVING ALREADY ATTAINED THE PINNACLE
OF ITS EVOLUTION SOMETIME IN THE 1800s?!
2. Legal arguments are public record. Lawyers make money. Medical
procedures are largely public record. Doctors make money. There is a
wireless protocol for transmitting music for free to anonymous users
known as radio. DJs make money and record labels *pay* them to
transmit the music. When somebody finds a way to fulfill a need, ways
are soon found to make it worth their while. Put a little trust in the
market, will you?
3. Let's pretend for a moment the critics who misinterpret open
content as being anti-profit are actually correct. Let's say that open
content would make it impossible for software/media companies to
remain in business. Open content would still eventually dominate. Why?
Because there is nothing magical about economic markets. Economic
markets are just a special case of general evolutionary principles. In
other words, profitability is only one of many ways that a replicator
can take root and spread. Viruses, dandelions, the English language,
the ASCII character set, and until recently Christianity have not been
profit-generating ventures. Yet somehow they seem to be doing pretty
well in terms of "market share". Open content evolves and adapts
faster than closed content. Open content is by definition immune to
piracy. Open content is highly resistant to lawsuits (do a search for
DeCSS sometime), bankruptcy of individual companies, anti-competitive
business practices, and discontinuation of product lines. Open content
requires less legal and bureaucratic overhead than closed
content. It's like nano-- if you don't learn to use it constructively,
it will eat you alive. You can use propaganda and government
protectionism to keep you afloat, but at most that will only delay the
inevitable.
4. Sorry to rant. It's just frustrating to see the same debate get
recapitulated here over and over, seemingly oblivious to the fact
that most of this has already been beaten to death, and the real
dialogue has already moved way forward. Here are the crib sheets:
http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/
This is what future scholars of early 21st century intellectual
history will be studying, so you better be prepared just in
case you run into one and they want to inverview you. ;-)
--AFB
-- handgun Waco 5th Group Why are the above words in my signature? Check out: http://www.echelon.wiretapped.net
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