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Comment by ravelantunes | Hacker News Reader

Not arguing on whether free software is or not anti-capitalist, but want to point out that the act of monetizing goods and services isn't incompatible with anti-capitalism.

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I hate people who orthogonalize monetization and open-source. Getting customers to cough up cash has always about knowing something they don't, a leverage you give up by releasing source code.

I'd say it depends upon how you define "capitalism" because most advocates of "capitalism" define it as an economy of free and voluntary exchanges while most of its detractors define it as an economy of giant corporations that oppress their workers and buy politicians to protect themselves from competition. The staunchest advocates of "capitalism" and its staunchest critics ironically tend to share the same hatred of corporate welfare and monopoly. Both are usually all for the little guy selling goods and services.

Just like with "socialism", most discussions about "capitalism" are actually people with different definitions talking past each other. I'd say the important issue in economics is monopoly vs anti-monopoly not "capitalism" vs "socialism" and free software is definitely on the side of anti-monopoly.

Capitalism is a production system where ressources allocation is decided by capital owners. It doesn't really oppose socialism (after all, if we're all capital owners we can all decide what to produce collectively!) , it's more opposed to dirigism (it has another name but I cannot remember). Successful example of dirigism are stuff like Apollo, Airbus or the Messmer Plan, often requires high centralization, which makes it highly undesirable to people (like me).

Anyway, mixed economy all the way imho. Capitalism for small stuff, dirigism in natural monopolies.

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