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There Is No Open Source Community (O'ReillyNet)There Is No Open Source Community (O'ReillyNet)Posted Jan 14, 2006 10:46 UTC (Sat) by rmstar (guest, #3672)In reply to: There Is No Open Source Community (O'ReillyNet) by smitty_one_each Parent article: There Is No Open Source Community (O'ReillyNet) I think you could as well argue that the last 250 years of world history have been about technology and economic factors, not about the people. Yes. The point of view seems to be that humans, their motives, feelings, etc. are irelevant. It is all just economic factors. I wonder what is behind this (horrible, inhuman, and btw also mistaken) way of looking at the world. Some new derivative of facism?
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Only economy? Posted Jan 15, 2006 2:25 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I guess it would not be too different from Marx's historical materialism. But even reading the wikipedia one gets the impression that Marx was much more intelligent than these feeble-minded pagans that advocate "open source" as an economic force.Let me offer an analogy. All buildings have to obey Newton's laws about motion and gravity; however there are infinite designs that comply with classical mechanics, from Egyptian pyramids to the modern proliferation of cubes. Saying that There is no art in architecture; classical mechanics determines all parameters in a building.is not only wrong, but also makes you look stupid. Likewise, all development must obey the simplest economic principles; after all it is an engineering (sometimes even industrial) activity. And yet there is so much more to it: saying that The commoditization of software and a gradual, long-term reduction in price have played far more important roles than previously recognized.is similarly an idiotic reductionism which is likely to get you nowhere. Yes, zero-cost software sells easier than expensive software; yes, freedom has a myriad practical advantages. But free software has manifested itself in many ways over the years. Just look at the number of foundations: Apache, Plone, Mozilla, FreeBSD, soon Fedora... and of course the Free Software Foundation. Some have fared better than others; a few have thrived; and a handful have just skyrocketed. No amount of economical babbling will explain what is self-evident to anyone in the community, e.g.: "share and share-alike" works better in practice than just "share"; if you don't volunteer nobody else will take up the task; helping your peer is also helping yourself. And anyway, Raymond has been writing about the same flawed assumptions for a long time, and better.
Sorry to break it to you... Posted Jan 15, 2006 14:56 UTC (Sun) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link] ...but much of Marx's stuff was ghost-written.
No problem Posted Jan 15, 2006 19:04 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Congratulations to the ghosts, then, whoever they were.
Ghostwriting in the 19th century Posted Jan 19, 2006 4:28 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] The primary 'ghost' was Friedrich Engels, who got second-author credit onmost of their later joint work. This isn't very controversial. Karl Marx didn't write English particularly well when he was first employed to write for the New York Tribune, so he asked Engels to translate for him; and for six months while he was in a rough patch (three sick children, one died) he asked Engels to do the whole job (and commended him on having 'found the right tone'). Parts of some of these Marx/Engels columns were published under the by-line of the editor Horace Greeley. http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1957... Later, other 'students' and benefactors of Marx were also pleased to help his work in such ways. In our day of carefully dated copyright attribution it might seem strange, but it wasn't so unusual in the 19th century for work to be published without every conceivable credit. It probably wouldn't happen in the free software world, but I'm sure there are people writing today who collaborate or ghostwrite privately like this.
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