Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 01:23:35 +0000
Subject: AUT: Open Source (was: parecon)
From: svejk <anterotesis-AT-yahoo.co.uk>



On Thursday, February 27, 2003, at 06:09  pm, John Holloway wrote:

>     What's Open Source?

Concise, non-technical article with links to the fundamental texts:
http://www.lita.org/ital/2101_bretthauer.html

Two good books:
The anthology "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" is 
available at:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html
Richard Stallman's biography, "Free as in Freedom", is at:
http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/

Both these books are published under "copyleft" and may be freely 
copied and redistributed.

>> From: chris wright <cwright.21stcentury-AT-rcn.com>
>>
>> I think that movements like Open Source in the computer world

Increasingly found elsewhere as well. Just about every area of 
"intellectual production" - music, writing, science, academia.

>>  point to
>> something very powerful because they explicitly and implicitly 
>> propose a
>> different way of living produced by people fundamentally alienated 
>> from
>> at least some aspects of the capital-labor relation based on their own
>> experience.  The response has been one in which people produce
>> use-values in a way that does not involve the production of
>> exchange-values.

Worth noting that there's an important idea of "work" in these circles: 
an extreme horror of drudgery  (nothing should ever be typed twice) 
coupled with breathtaking exertion (48hr long coding sessions fueled by 
astonishing quantites of caffeine).

>>  There are genuine problems with Open Source in so far
>> as it reflects some technical insularity, some patriarchal and
>> technocratic aspects (such as the technophilia, a stubborn at times
>> refusal to take "users" seriously and a tendency to look down on 
>> people
>> who want a better appliance in a PC), and some confused free market
>> ideologues

some? many, I'd say. And with disproportionate weight in the OSS world.

>> who can't see that the Open Source idea is exactly a threat
>> to capitalist social relations, but overall, a serious examination of
>> Open Source would to me be worth more than a lot of arguments over
>> ParEcon, which only holds any weight among Leftists, it seems.

Absolutely.

John

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