Re: <nettime> Interview with Richard Stallman in New Left Review (September-October 2018)

[Carsten Agger <agger@modspil.dk>]

On 10/29/18 3:00 PM, Emery Hemingway wrote:
> A fight for economic rights for software workers is a fight for paid/dual
> licensing model of open source, and a fight against the entire open 
> source
> establishment. First against the naive/senile GNU theorists, next the 
> Open
> Source Initiative, then IBM and Microsoft (they love open source), and 
> then
> the Chinese multinationals, who have profited most from an environment of
> "free as in free".
As someone who worked as a software worker since 1996, I disagree 
completely. Using proprietary licensing would not improve our economic 
wellbeing at all. Companies will always charge their customers as much 
as possible and pay their employees as little as possible. Using 
proprietary licenses allow companies to cheat their customers by 
charging many times over for the same work, but that  doesn't 
necessarily benefit their employees.

On the other hand, the vast infrastrucutre of free (as in Freedom) tools 
for whatever purpose makes the life of a programmer much easier and 
makes us much efficient, which also augments the value of the work we do.

Also, it's interesting and important for the potential democratization 
of modern technology that we can all download, use and even change 
absolutely top-notch, state of the art software in a lot of areas.


> On Sunday, October 28, 2018 10:02:53 PM CET, Florian Cramer wrote:
> > Today, IBM announced that it will buy up Red Hat for $30 billion. 
> > That value was mostly created by the labor of volunteer, un- or 
> > underpaid developers of the Free/Libre/Open Source software that 
> > makes up Red Hat's products. These people will not see a dime of 
> > IBM’s money. There need to be discussions of economic flaws and 
> > exploitation in the FLOSS development/distribution model.
Most Free/Open Source Software is in fact not created by unpaid 
volunteers or even by underpaid workers, but by professional developers 
at the companies or organizations who sponsor the projects.

And Red Hat's value is not as much the free software it has used as its 
knowledge and infrastructure - which has arguably not been built by 
unpaid volunteers.

In general, I'd say, top-professional FOSS tools are not built by 
amateurs or volunteers - though maybe by people who like to make them 
and who also can get paid by consulting or doing other works related to 
that.

But as I said, it's not the licensing regime, but the exploitative 
nature of capitalist companies, that's the problem. Going proprietary 
wouldn't help a bit. Creating cooperatives that shared the income 
without any need for "bosses" or "owners" would be a safer bet.

Best

Carsten

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