Metaphors of Free Software

[Garreau, Alexandre]

On 2014-09-28 at 12:36, theo.schmidt at wilhelmtux.ch wrote:
> Am 25.09.2014 08:29, schrieb Michael Kesper:
> ...
>> I believe in anarchism as much as in communism. (To be clear: not at all).
>> I'd vote strongly to let politics and religion out of metaphors for Free
>> Software.
>
> I think Free Software *is* in itself a political principle. Certainly
> it seems to me to have parallels to libertarian thinking (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism ), which itself has
> parallels to anarchism.

Well, Libertarianism is constructed taking over anarchist ideas and
turning them back to justify capitalism. They’re two opposed
philosophies, yet anarchism have more in common with libertarianism than
with Nazism (aka. “national-socialism”).

Yet if you see it from an anarchist point of view, you will find a lot
of common points with free software philosophy, and think the rest is
worthless, but you will think the same about libertarianism if you
believe more in libertarianism, the same for Nazism if you’re a neonazi.

As I said, Freedom is based on will, and is by definition what you want,
it’s an universal value and everybody would definitely agree on
it. Where we diverge is on “What/How/Why is Freedom”. Free Software is a
lot more easily close to freedom than way complex/complete politic
philosophies, thus everybody agree on it, from anarchists to fascists,
including socialists/authoritarian-communists and
liberalists/libertarianists, it’s completely normal.

One common thing I see between quite all hackers I know is the strong
will of not linking free software with one particular ideology to
promote it. And it’s right, because it would link its success on one
thoughts structure, drastically reducing its chances of success.

For example, here in France (well, also in the rest of Europe, I think)
we see since some years a rise of extreme-right/national-socialism and
fascists/xenophobes ideas, and they’re rising more and more votes (here
that’s because the fascist are the only people who still vote, all the
other people are disenchanted of politics), so having them support
strongly free software is a good thing, because at least even when they
will be there at power we could still fight for free software.

And even if they don’t win, everybody is copying *all* their ideas, so
that even if they loose the people at power will be with fascists ideas
*comprising the support of free software upon all Nation*, isn’t that
great?

So I vote for keeping “Democratic” in this comparison, even if I think
it’s a confuse and meaningless term, because doing so people could
indifferently interpret it as “Populism”, “National-*”, “Panarchy”,
“Anarchism”, or everything else meeting their political thought, so that
everybody will keep supporting Free Software.

> In the not too far away day, when we will have programs or even
> machines which are indistinguishable from humans, software will also
> have strong impacts on religious thinking.

At each Science progress we have :p And yet we have religions… don’t
dream too much: religion is a really sticky thing, you can’t get rid of
it so easily just demonstrating it’s absurd, because it’s not based on
rational thought. Even showing them all demonstrations, scientific
possibilities and reasoning of the world, they could still find
something absurd to say which would be conceptually based on nothing
else but itself and be able to shout “victory!” even when they loose.

PS: the worst part is I’m being serious, it’s not even a troll: having
free software not linked with any thought is great, because since we all
think it’s actually following our ideas, we would all agree that at the
end, since free software would be winning and it’d be actually following
our political ideas, our political thought would win, since it’s true.