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Comment by slowpoke | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with Linus here. He first goes on about how "open source" is not about making the world a better place, but then states that the GPL is all about fairness. Well, that's the point - we want a fair world, where everyone's freedoms are respected. How is that not making the world a better place?

You could just as well start arguing that there is no such thing as altruism, and that everyone always acts out of selfish reasons, even if helping someone else. I must say I find this to be a quite misantropic attitude in general.

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"I must say I find this to be a quite misantropic attitude in general."

That's circular reasoning, even if disguised. You are (implicitly) saying that selfishness is morally wrong, and therefore people who propose that every act is out of selfishness have a negative worldview (a world view in which everybody is morally wrong), and therefore they are misanthropic (because of your own assumption that selfishness is morally wrong and that considering everybody morally wrong is about only seeing the bad in people). If you remove the moral presupposition on 'selfishness' from your argument, your conclusion to misanthropy (which has an inherent moral judgement) doesn't hold any more.

And just to point out you don't have to go the Ayn Rand route to come up with an alternative.....

I believe our virtues are built out of our vices. Selfishness can clearly cause harmful actions, but it can also be a strong motivator for building a common good as well, and these are not mutually exclusive. Indeed every vice I can think of can be built into a virtue.

In this view it isn't virtuous or not to be selfish, but rather the manner in which we are selfish (or lustful, or envious, or angry, etc) that creates virtue or vice. Order your vices and they become your virtues.

And just to point out you don't have to go the Ayn Rand route to come up with an alternative...

No, but one should probably consider what Rand had to say about selfishness, when considering discussions of this nature. Her ideas make a lot of sense; and have been a positive influence on a lot of people.

I guess the way I look at Rand is a using her works is ideally a bit like using Nietzsche (and indeed I see a lot of continuity in these two thinkers). Their actual ideas are interesting solely as an exercise in inverting the way we normally think about things and thus creating a void where we can create something new.

The nice thing about playing with inverting opposites is that it is useful in destroying what we thought we know. I wouldn't treat the inversion as any more valuable than what it inverts though.

I'm not exactly an Ayn Rand scholar, but AIUI, Rand was influenced by Nietzsche and claimed him as such an influence early in her career... but at some point later in her career she broke ways with him and adopted a more negative outlook on his ideas. At any rate, I can definitely see some overlap or correspondence in their works (disclaimer: I'm also not a Nietzsche scholar).

Uh, whether altruism actually exists is a matter of serious debate. Google "does altruism exist".

I think it's telling that one of the most successful open source leaders doesn't really believe in altruism as the motivator for open source.

If you always acted as if people would do things just to be nice, you might be continually confused about why contributions were made or not made. If you just assume that people are going to contribute for their own interest, then your project may be more likely to succeed.

Contributing for your own interest doesn't mean "selfish" or misanthropic. It means finding common ground where interests align and both parties win.

Do you think IBM or Google contributes to Linux to be nice? Obviously they have business interests in Linux. That seems to be the simplest explanation. And I don't see it to be different for other contributors either.

Random links from Google:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/11/does-altru...

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/is-pure-altr...

If you define altruism in an artificially stringent way - e.g. if you decide that actions cannot be altruistic unless they result in pain, cannot be habitual, have nothing to do with any relationship, have nothing to do with sympathy, have nothing to do with any ideology, have nothing to do with trying to be a better person... then of course you will conclude that it does not exist. Not because it is not a real thing, but because you wanted to determine that it does not exist, and therefore artificially ruled out all the ordinary cases.

But this is a game of words because that's not what altruism is. Altruism can be based on kinship, reciprocity, ideology, self-image, sympathy, habit and other things which are active in normal people's minds.

IBM and Google are public corporations, meaning that turning a profit is the whole point of their existence, and that their leadership have a legal responsibility to shareholders. The same is not true of human beings, much as a few have decided that turning a profit is the whole point of their own personal existences.

There is some degree of ambiguity in the common usage of the word vs. the term that evolutionary biologists use.

I don't agree with your definition -- altruism based on reciprocity is an oxymoron. altruism based on kinship, i.e. a mother feeding a child, is not altruism. It could be called "nice" or "heartwarming", but it's not altruism.

But putting the definition of words aside, what do you think is the most common motivator for open source? Do you think that most contributions to the Linux kernel are due to aligned interests, or due to altruism? (Whatever altruism means, I would say it is mutually exclusive from "aligned interests")

I think Linus probably has some insight into this question, having led the project for so long.

I think pure altruism is rare but possible. In fact I vaguely remember a story about a guy contributing drivers to the Linux kernel for old hardware that he didn't even own and never planned on using.

On the other hand, maybe he just had a different idea of fun than other people (in all seriousness).

>In fact I vaguely remember a story about a guy contributing drivers to the Linux kernel for old hardware that he didn't even own and never planned on using.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1047633/one-writes-...

Possibly this fellow, who wrote drivers for over 200 USB webcams?

Yes exactly!!

In the interview though, he says it started when he bought web cams for his daughters but there was no Linux support.

But then he realized that a lot of the code was shareable, so he generalized it to 235 cameras.

You could call the difference between making 2 drivers work and 235 "altruism". Or you could just call it "doing it a good job". Most people have the desire to do a good job.

I frequently do the same thing... I call it cleaning up dirty hacks, and learning the essence of a problem. Not necessarily altruism, but I won't object if anyone calls it that.

Or just showing off !

Never underestimate the benefit of people showing off. Otherwise Mozart would have retired at 12 and become a music teacher

I know the debate about altruism and I was implying that I'm on the side of people who reject the hypothesis that it doesn't exist.

I do agree about finding common ground and shared interests, but I don't think all of this is an end by itself - it's a means to achieve a fair world. This goes for the GPL, too, and indeed free software in general, and I think this is what Linus does not understand from his purely technical perspective.

I don't know if altruism exists. I don't even know what "exists" means in this context. Does the color orange exist? Or is it just an arbitrary name we give something we perceive, dependent entirely on our own language? I do think that pure altruism is overrated though.

On some level I think to be successful at a business you have to think in some way you are making the world a better place. You might not be doing that purely altruistically. Indeed you are probably interested in money too. But to be successful you have to think you are doing something cool that makes peoples lives better.

I think reciprocity is ultimately better than pure altruism for a couple of reasons. First, if you expect to make a profit, you have a cushion to continue your work when things go downhill. I have heard of not-for-profit magazines ceasing publication because of a lack of such a buffer and having to deal with unexpected expenses, for example.

Secondly interdependence is a good thing, and it is spiritually nourishing (I mean this not in the sense of supernatural but in the sense of one's mood and spirit).

Thirdly reciprocity helps ensure that the actions actually are being seen by others as valuable and worth supporting. This prevents some sorts of hubris-related mistakes.

I don't know if altruism exists. I do know that reciprocity-based economic interdependence is something I value a lot more.

it is only a serious debate between computer nerds and those so diluted by financial reasoning. It all sounds scientific. Its sad really.

It is fairness in terms of "I will let you use the source code I wrote, but you need to let me use any changes you make to it". It's not about "everyone's freedoms", that's what Free Software and RMS are all about. Linus has always said that his choice to use GPLv2 was about the reciprocity of contributions to the kernel project, not about the freedom crusade of RMS (to the point of calling Free Software people "insane").

He first goes on about how "open source" is not about making the world a better place, but then states that the GPL is all about fairness. Well, that's the point - we want a fair world, where everyone's freedoms are respected.

The fairness he mentions is not about having a fair world, but a tit-for-tat kind of fairness. When talking about a fair world, people usually mean a world where everyone is equal, which is not tit-for-tat fairness.

> When talking about a fair world, people usually mean a world where everyone is equal, which is not tit-for-tat fairness.

Citation needed.

>Citation needed.

Agreed. I think most people who talk about fairness and equality are saying "don't fuck me before I've even started" rather than "we must both have the same outcome."

Maybe this common misunderstanding is a hangover from the fear of the red menace?

It seems that the meaning of "fair" depends on the location.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-10869722

"Fair" is one of those concepts that doesn't quite mean the same thing on either side of the Atlantic.

I think you've latched onto the wrong part of that quote. He's not saying "open source" isn't making the world a better place, he's saying that it does. However the primary mechanism by which it does so, is based on rational self-interest (driven in part by the very clever reciprocal nature of the GPL), not feel-good gestures without actual impact.

It's analogous to Dawkin's selfish gene or Adam Smith's invisible hand, individual self-interest at one level drives communal benefit at a higher level.

> individual self-interest at one level drives communal benefit at a higher level

Something important is missing: this individual self interest must be "well pondered" and long term. If not, you get a McDonald-like catastrophic result.

A lot of companies are just fixing stuff for their software and hardware, by submitting patches it almost guarantees it will turn up everywhere - I could imagine getting Microsoft or Apple to provide a feature to all their customers is a lot harder.

The other reason is maintainability, it's time consuming to maintain a patch outside the tree and people will end up submitting them so that it doesn't get bitrot.

Doesn't really seem altruistic to me.

Having dealt with Microsoft support, you are right. They genuinely don't want to provide a code fix as that means hassle. You just don't get that with open source whether you fix it yourself or report a bug.

Also consider this with regard to other open source projects:

Proprietary PostgreSQL vendors often contribute a heck of a lot of source code back for a reason that seems obvious when you think about it and applies to something like Linux too. The basic issue is that if you keep your own private fork and maximize what's not shared then you also maximize the work you have integrating what everyone else is contributing. By giving back as much as you can, you cut your costs down the road. That isn't to say that EnterpriseDB gives back everything but they back quite a lot.

When it comes to a proprietary vendor like Microsoft, it is much harder to get the QA done, and get updated drivers out to customers.

I wrote a blog post a while ago on motivations for open source: http://gaiustech.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/why-open-source/

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