Politics and freedom

[Stefan Meretz]

Thomas Bohn schrieb:
> > economic-right (monetarian)
> > social-right (conservative)
> > economic-left (Keynesian)
> > social-left (liberal)
> 
> Social-left = liberal? I can't believe it.

This _is_ correct for the traditional political system in the u.s.,
you can compare it with europe.

> As a socialist it's not a
> pleasure for me, to set equal with liberal ideology.

With freedom ideology in the sense of civil rights like Stallman
does - why not?

I don't think that the old political coordinate system fits very
well on the historically new FS movement. Currently we (see below)
discuss four criteria which are essentials in Free Software as a
generally new social process and new form of production (hard to
translate):
- individual self-development/self-fulfilment ("individuelle
Selbstentfaltung")
- collective self-organisation ("kollektive Selbstorganisation")
- using global networks
- being free from economic value

The last point means that the code is free from making the code
private and limited (an effect of the GPL) which is essential for
making profit with proprietary code. So this does not mean, that you
can "make money with FS" in a global sense, but you have to add
other "values" like Raymond describes it in his cauldron-paper
(which I don't like).

You can find more of these discussions in the oekonux-project.
Oekonux - in english it must be econux;-) - is a combination of
economy and gnu/linux and asks, whether the principles of FS can be
generalized for whole society. It is a german project yet, but
debates are in english and german. More you'll find:
http://www.oekonux.de (german) or http://www.oekonux.org (english,
but few informations). A conference is planned:
http://www.oekonux-konferenz.de (german cfp).

Ciao,
Stefan

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