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Comment by grrrrr | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy the analogy. Even if you work for a company that fosters what he refers to as a socialist work ethic that company is still operating in a capitalist system, subject to the usual market forces. What he is describing sounds more like a collegiate environment. The nature of software development, and other similar knowledge economy industries, naturally demand a more collaborative & collegiate approach to getting things done, but they are all fundamentally driven by market forces & constraints such as funding & sales.

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> The nature of software development, and other similar knowledge economy industries, naturally demand a more collaborative & collegiate approach to getting things done, but they are all fundamentally driven by market forces & constraints such as funding & sales.

You have heard of this open source thing, right? I don't think that you can argue that the open source ethos has anything to do with capitalism. In fact, I would say that Stallman's views on software are pretty overtly communist, as they contest the very concept of private ownership of a piece of software.

And yet, without the freedom to won the software you create, you cannot give it away. Open source s capitalst because it is based on the presumption that the creator owns the sotftware and can determine the license to it.

If stall man really believes nobody can own software, then stallman believes that all programmers should be slaves, unable to profit from their own labor.

Copyleft was conceived as a hack of the copyright system, a necessary evil because placing a work in the public domain allows other people to profit from the work. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft:

As Stallman deemed it impractical in the short term to eliminate current copyright law and the wrongs he perceived it perpetuated, he decided to work within the framework of existing law; he created his own copyright license, the Emacs General Public License,[8] the first copyleft license.

There is nothing that keeps an open source developer from profiting from their labor. Some are employed by a company explicitly to work on OSS, or contract with a company to implement a desired feature. In fact, an open source developer can _only_ profit from their labor, and not at all from their "capital".

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