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Comment by javert | Hacker News Reader

Bravo, a poignant demonstration of the value of collectivism through code.

Open source software is not "collectivism", which is a moral/political doctrine.

Indeed. Open source software is the first example I'll reach for when talking about the difference between the ideas of "free market" and "capitalism". Anybody can choose to contribute to open source or not, for reasons that are selfish or altruistic, in any way that they decide. Other's may or may not decide to pull their changelists, but everything is all about voluntary transactions - what you'd call a totally free market. On the other hand its totally unlike capitalism for reasons I hope I don't have to explain.

I can easily imagine collectivist code development, but I can't imagine a collectivist software effort that would allow both Ruby and Python, both Java and C# to exist. I mean, if you're making these decisions collectively how could you justify the division of effort?

Capitalism doesn't mean that everybody is running around for themselves. If its opponents seriously thought about that accusation for a moment, they'd realize that it is completely inconsistent with also talking about large corporations being abusive... indeed, large corporations existing at all. Capitalism allows you to freely set up your own organizations within its top-level free matrix, so if you find a problem space where near dictatorial "collectism" is the answer, you're free to choose that. (Fast food springs to mind.) That's in contrast to many ideologies which really do insist they are the right answer for every scale. Making that accusation of capitalism is generally a form of projection of the biases of the accuser, since it works exactly the opposite. (And the answer to many of the putative abuses of the system is for people to band together and form things like insurance corporations and credit unions and such.)

A large fast food giant (to take your example) is still not a dictatorship and it's still not collectivist.

You can have collectivist things under capitalism (for example, a hippie commune), but you cannot have a dictatorship.

On the other hand its totally unlike capitalism for reasons I hope I don't have to explain.

You're going to have to explain it if you want me to tell you why you're wrong in thinking that they're "totally different."

The free market is the economic aspect of capitalism, which is an economic and political system.

Well, I'd say that that Capitalism is the practice of the owners of capital and providers of labor (which might be overlapping sets) getting together to sell items for a profit, with said profits apportioned between labor and capital somehow. Which is clearly not how open source software works.

Capitalism is entirely compatible with free markets and since it seems to be the best way to produce rivalrous, excludable goods I'd expect to see it in any free market unless humans someday invent something better. On the other hand you can easily imagine a non-free market capitalist system, say where the state grants a monopoly on every good to some company or other, or maybe just auctions the monopolies off. I'm not sure how you can call capitalism a political system, since it's existed under a wide variety of political systems ever since it's time coexisting with feudalism.

"I mean, if you're making these decisions collectively how could you justify the division of effort?" For the sake of argument, it could be arrived at by deciding that Python was good for some things and Ruby was good for others. Or rationally understanding that tastes differ and so it would be good to have both options to maximize individual productivity. Or by collectively deciding to have a competition. Or any number of other ways.

It's collectivist in the sense that it is owned by the people.

Open Source software is owned by the copyright holder. "the people" have no ownership whatsoever. Merely a license to use the software (albeit a very permissive license)

In the case of the GPL, everyone can use, modify and re-distribute it of their own accord, as long as it's distributed under the license the author chose. It's not the same, but effectively pretty close to ownership. It's a public entitlement to a permissive license. Open source != GPL, however; the BSD license creates something indistinguishable from common ownership.

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