The amusing case of tech libertarians
mattbruenig.com
mattbruenig.com
Indeed, a symbiotic relationship that has developed between the world of open source and the proprietary projects of the tech giants startups and startups, all driven by the enlightened self-interest of all the actors involved, big and small.
As for the more dogmatic GNU-style Free Software movement, it makes a couple of (erroneous, in my view) assumptions about a inherent coerciveness of "non-free" software, and builds their entire philosophical vision out from that idea. However, the continued eclipse of the GPL by more "liberal" BSD/MIT-style licenses seems to demonstrate that those assumptions are increasingly failing to validate.
It's interesting to note that Eric Raymond, author of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and one of the key collaborators that developed the term "Open Source" and the ensuing definitions, is a pretty staunch libertarian. He's written extensively about both topics at http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/.
I want to stand on the shoulders of giants, not ask giants for permission and I don't care at all if the system that allows for this is called "marxist", "capitalist" or any other "ist" you might dream up.
In fact I don't think there actually are any sociopolitical ideologies which say making things and giving them away for free is something that is wrong or shouldn't happen, so I'm really not sure who or what the author is trying to call out here.
I'm almost convinced that nobody understands what libertarianism is, including libertarians.
Almost invariably if libertarian X explains libertarianism to me, and after thinking about it I come up with some objections or questions and X is not available, so I find some other libertarian, Y, and bring up my questions, I find that Y is a different kind of libertarian and his flavor of libertarianism doesn't include the features I objected to.
Just look at the sidebar of /r/libertarian on Reddit. It contains a "Types of Libertarianism" section which contains links to sub-reddits for various libertarian types. It has agorism, anarcho-capitalism, christian-ancaps, geolibertarianism, libertarian left, mutualism, market anarchism, minarchy, objectivism, and voluntarism. (I realize this is not necessarily fully accurate...objectivists do not consider themselves libertarians).
I'm pretty sure that on almost every issue I've found some type of libertarianism that fits very well with my views (much better than the Republican or Democrat party platforms do), but is way off of my views on several other issues I find important.
I think this happens because I think libertarians (at least many flavors) construct their rules backwards from the way I think they should be constructed. They take an axiomatic approach, coming up with some general principles that they feel are self-evidently correct. Then they deduce the rules of society that follow from those axioms.
A good example of this is Rothbard. His "The Ethics of Liberty" is a wonderful examination of the consequences of a small number of general principles. He follows those principles wherever they lead, and gets to some points where he admits the outcomes can be terrible. For example, parents not legally required to care for their children--they cannot actively kill them, but if parents decide they don't want their newborn baby they can just ignore it until it dies. He thinks that this would not happen too often, because instead of letting the baby die, the parents could sell it on the free market to someone who wants to raise a child. (Children are a theoretical pain in the ass for many flavors of libertarianism, not just Rothbard libertarianism).
I take terrible outcomes as a sign that we didn't get the axioms right. We should be starting with the kind of society we want to have, and then pick our axioms to be a minimal set of general principles that generate that kind of society, rather than picking the axioms and then accepting whatever society arises from them.
Every person will give a slightly different answer as to what it is.
There are indeed a lot of right-wing libertarians in today's tech scene, but I also see a lot of left-wing libertarians here. If you have warm fuzzy feelings about Universal Basic Income, for example, you might be a left-libertarian. Left-libertarians support a strong social safety net to establish a safe minimum, as well as a relative lack of regulations on what you can do once that minimum is reached.
if one assumes a purist theory of communism (something more akin to unionism) and an impure version of libertarianism (something closer to market neo-liberalism) -- then the article rings out. In any other combination the point of the article becomes debatable.
while I understanding that both communist and libertarian theories were about a lot more than being a grumpy white man, attempts to closely tie modern era decentralization movements to these nearly antiquated theories feels at many times to be a thing white men do to justify their grumpiness. The article didn't go there (it carefully only uses the word "communistically") but much of the discussion on the article does.