NT: free software and money

[Moritz Sinn]

James Davis <jamesd at jml.net> writes:

> On Wed, 31 Mar 2004, Moritz Sinn wrote:
>
>> just to correct myself: it wasn't meant quite serious, but since communism is
>> mainly about freedom and most ppl are more free in usa than in china
>> there is some trueness in it
>
> I thought that communism was an economic ideology based on the collective
> ownership of production and has had little to do with freedom. Certainly
> the intention is to eliminate class inequality if you'd like to consider
> that a freedom.

i know that we're going a bit OT here.. so just say something if you
don't want to discuss it here.

communism is not a economic ideology. only a society can be communist,
not an economy. communism as it was described by its "discoverer" karl
marx and friedrich engels is a society without a state, without money
and without economic pressure. the communistic ideal is that everyone is
totaly free, that means also free from economic needs. 

communism wants to use the productivity created by capitalism for the
humans and not for the profit.

> Whether any of the one-party governments (esp. China) that operate under
> that name are actually communist is very much open to debate. In any case
> I fail to see the connection between free software and communism.
> Collective production of software certainly does work but that doesn't
> imply that all successful free software comes from a collective of
> developers.

there is not much open to debate in case you take communism as it was
first defined in the 19th century by marx and engels and i think that is
what we should do, anything else doesn't make much sense. communism simply aks for
no governemnt at all, for no state, for no money. according to that
china is not communistic.

you cannot call free software communistic because free software is not a
society. but i think free software has some communistic touch because it
shows that you can produce without economic pressure, that you can grant
real freedom and that you can produce without capital. it also shows
that at least in this case it is even better to do it this way than the
classical way to produce in the capitalistic market. 

free software shows that i can work in another way with even better results.

regards,
 moritz

-- 
I'm still waiting for the advent of the computer science groupie.