For the record I am more of an open source guy. I think tools are used by people in all sorts of ways and I care about how good they are and that they should gently encourage the right kind of culture. Free software is about liberty as the foremost social value and derives everything from there. It would be interesting to many laissez faire market advocates that almost all the Free Software advocates are extremely leftist civil libertarians.
In fact the whole thing might not compute for anarcho capitalists because the main enemy of Free Software -- which is restricted or unfree software -- is produced and used, not by governments, but by corporations. You might realize why they are so leftist and why they actually use the copyright laws to ENFORCE software freedom (an interesting twist!) when you realize that their main enemy is privately held companies who build large platforms on top of proprietary codebases.
I am for open source for practical reasons, they are for free software for philosophical reasons. And lookit: The PRIVATE COMPANY (which anarcho capitalists so admire as the outcome of a completely laissez faire society) is in fact the government over its little jurisdiction, which is the proprietary installed code base that people have. Such as the Bloomberg terminal, or Windows or the iPhone. In many industries, you have to pick one of several companies and they all are run as feudalism. They grant certain favors to some app developers and not others. You can't just deploy apps you write on them.
The exceptions are Linux and the Web, etc. Which have in fact become the most widespread operating system and platform, respectively. Linux and other open source software did it using licenses on their code that USED GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT THROUGH COPYRIGHT to prevent the software being used by companies to lock people out. The Web did it through a culture of openness where every user could View Code and browsers had to conform to standards of bodies like W3C and WhatWG.
My point can be summarized as usual: people create groups, and if it's not governments then it's companies. Someone will always be lording it over others, creating barriers to unrestricted freedom. And the most we can do is have systems to guide things away from terrible abuses of power.
One of my friends (who is an anarcho capitalist) replied:
There's nothing wrong with creating groups, as long as nobody forces me to be a member. I'll read about open source vs free software, but I think you know my view: I'm against IP because I'm against legal fictions, because they violate natural property rights.
No one is forcing you to become a member of New York City or your particular town or state. You can move.
What anarchists are really lamenting is the lack of available space where people havent set up a group with a government. That just goes to show how it emerges naturally out of other states, which can briefly be described as close to anarchist. And sometimes those states arent so glamorous.
Anyway it's the same in software. It takes massive effort to build a system that is completely free for everybody. That is what the Free Software movement has done. But they are besieged at every turn by PRIVATE, proprietary interests such as businesses who lick their lips and want the "freedom" to use the software those guys built to RESTRICT the freedom of THEIR users. So the Free Software Foundation and its allies have a great ally in the US government and copyright laws! They use them specifically to banish infringers who would use software licensed under GNU License for example without giving their users freedoms.
Interesting? Government helping keep people more free. Thats what happens when the perps are private companies and not governments.
And to address your point - it is just as hard to move away from Windows and Mac, or from Android, iPhone and Blackberry all of them etc. as it is for you to move from the United States. Sure it's possible. But first you need a massive effort to build a natio-- err I mean a platform that is based on principles of freedom. And along the way you will need the help of governments to defend it from people easily coming in and ruining the whole thing because they were "free" to take what you built for their own selfish interests.
The dynamics are almost exactly the same! But it's an interesting case study because software battles are virtual, hurt less people, and softwrae moves really fast. Yet you can actually see the problems that would happen with anarchy without enforcement.
Even today, the free software movement is developing new licenses to combat a new threat: hardware that will only run an approved version of an open source program.
I was going to write something up to the guy above you, but you nailed all my points. Good show!
> Even today, the free software movement is developing new licenses to combat a new threat: hardware that will only run an approved version of an open source program.
And a lot of people miss that this is why they wrote the GPLv3 in the first place, and why it is such a big deal that the Linux kernel doesn't adopt it.
> Even today, the free software movement is developing new licenses to combat a new threat: hardware that will only run an approved version of an open source program.
You mean, like the GPLv3, which restricts the freedom to choose such software to business users?
Right, which is why I am not a major fan of ideologies of any kind getting too much power. I think there are trade-offs, in this case the freedom of businesses vs the freedom of their users.
In fact the whole thing might not compute for anarcho capitalists because the main enemy of Free Software -- which is restricted or unfree software -- is produced and used, not by governments, but by corporations. You might realize why they are so leftist and why they actually use the copyright laws to ENFORCE software freedom (an interesting twist!) when you realize that their main enemy is privately held companies who build large platforms on top of proprietary codebases.
I am for open source for practical reasons, they are for free software for philosophical reasons. And lookit: The PRIVATE COMPANY (which anarcho capitalists so admire as the outcome of a completely laissez faire society) is in fact the government over its little jurisdiction, which is the proprietary installed code base that people have. Such as the Bloomberg terminal, or Windows or the iPhone. In many industries, you have to pick one of several companies and they all are run as feudalism. They grant certain favors to some app developers and not others. You can't just deploy apps you write on them.
The exceptions are Linux and the Web, etc. Which have in fact become the most widespread operating system and platform, respectively. Linux and other open source software did it using licenses on their code that USED GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT THROUGH COPYRIGHT to prevent the software being used by companies to lock people out. The Web did it through a culture of openness where every user could View Code and browsers had to conform to standards of bodies like W3C and WhatWG.
My point can be summarized as usual: people create groups, and if it's not governments then it's companies. Someone will always be lording it over others, creating barriers to unrestricted freedom. And the most we can do is have systems to guide things away from terrible abuses of power.