On Sun, Aug 3, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Troy Benjegerdes <[1]hozer@hozed.org>
   wrote:

   On Sun, Aug 03, 2014 at 10:02:44AM -0700, Reed Black wrote:
   > I may be responding to a troll posting, but it's a fun one, so...
   >

     I should probably not read Thomas Piketty's Capital and then post on
     the
     internet in the same week timespan. But it's been quite an amusing
     digression.

   It's basically Das Kapital, with charts and new predictions and
   suggested remedies. Nearly a hundred mentions of Marx, and the same
   blindness about what happens to capital that's accumulated, but
   reinvested as all major accumulations are.
   One need only look at any ten years interval where the wealth gap
   expanded, and then examine the quantity and quality of goods affordable
   by the poorest in that time. It gives question to his predictions and
   his radical plans for 80% tax rates and the like. Trying to pull up the
   wage earners by pulling down the wage payers hasn't worked yet.
   But it does have an interesting parallel to the below...

   > > War is peace, freedom is slavery, and Carl Marx was right about
   from each
   > > according to his ability, to each according to his need. This is
   proven
   > > by the market penetration of the GPLv2 linux kernel. Capitalists
   need high
   > > quality softare, and they cannot afford the capital to own
   something that
   > > actually works.
   > >
   >
   > GPL has little to nothing to do with Marx.
   >
   > GPL relies entirely on private ownership of intellectual property for
   its
   > enforcement. Private property is GPL's very foundation. And nobody is
   > compelled to use GPL licensed software, or to agree to a GPL license.
   Those
   > who do enter into an agreement aren't even required to redistribute
   their
   > changes unless they redistribute the derivative product. There's no
   > compulsory communal property here, no Marx.
   >
   > Observe that generally, one can set up GPL and various other forms of
   > voluntary communal contracts under capitalism. But that doesn't make
   > capitalism communist/Marxist. It does make capitalism the more
   flexible
   > system. One in which the GPL linux kernel is indeed doing well, along
   with
   > countless privately owned projects.

     Marx was worried about endless accumulation of capital by
     industrialists. I
     find it rather hilariously amusing that for Marx's commons to work,
     it has to
     be in the capitalist framework of intellectual property ownership.
     The brilliance of the GPL(v2) is the 'compulsory communal' aspect
     only kicks
     in when you sell something. No sale, no compulsion to share with
     your customers.
     It will be interesting to see how the AGPLv3 plays out long-term. I
     see a lot
     of code getting released under that license, and I expect at some
     point it
     will start eating the market share of closed-source cloud 'service'
     providers,
     because no capital owner can afford to pay engineers when the
     competition is
     doing the work for free.

   A car maker is at a competitive disadvantage if it wastes time trying
   to perfect sheet metal screws and socket wrenches. The other car makers
   use commodity parts for anything that isn't a unique selling point and
   differentiate by building the last, non-standard parts.
   Most businesses and other competitive constructive ventures are like
   this.
   Expect open source software to eat into the platform of just about
   every vertical, but expect that to happen with proprietary software
   developers' full cooperation. At some point, printer drivers stop being
   a value added differentiator and capitalists see the best returns in
   integrating and building on top of CUPS. Font engines become
   uninteresting and FreeType makes sense. Filesystems, network protocols,
   web development frameworks, etc... It's why they'll cooperate to help
   open source projects develop best of breed implementations from the
   bottom up, but stop where proprietary projects still differentiate
   themselves in interesting ways. When it gets close to the consumer,
   we'll always have gaps the size of the space between an xtank and a
   Diablo III.
   I'd expect open source projects to subsume more and more things covered
   by proprietary software and services today, but I'd also expect closed
   source software and walled gardens to continue to be the points of
   competitive innovation. By the time there are open source solutions
   commoditizing today's cloud services, tomorrow's cloud services will be
   doing appealing new things the public thinks it can't live without.
   That's not a blind prediction, but an extrapolation of what's already
   happened. Free WebDAV implementations are here, but now the public
   wants built in media transcoding for mobile, syncing, and other
   features as part of their web filesystems. Virtualization systems exist
   with virtually zero overhead, but now CTOs expect automatic scaling,
   monitoring and security as push-button add ons. Most every
   well-established cloud service one can name has a lightweight open
   source alternative that looks like that cloud service only a few years
   ago.
   In a way, capitalists need to keep ceding to the commons to control
   their costs as they build atop the old in order to afford to stay
   relevant, or they need to seek other revenue channels while nearly
   giving the actual service away to all comers. It's a bizarre but
   wonderful generative system.

     I guess Marx got trolled by Richard Stallman.

   It's cute, but I never saw anything where Stallman himself seemed to
   believe free software was socialist in nature. (Anyone have pointers on
   that?) I know socialists/Marxists love to embrace it and him, but I
   suspect the movement and Stallman could at best be called fellow
   travelers of Marxism at best. There may be some common activities, but
   not goals or ideologies.

References

   1. mailto:hozer@hozed.org