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Comment by sandyarmstrong | Hacker News Reader

"The free-software ethos and the founders of the open-source movement are mega-racist libertarian people, and so it’s always really weird to me that a bunch of Leftists are so into open source; it explicitly manifests capitalist social relations."

Mega-racist? What? Lost me a bit there.

It's weird to me that he speaks about the free software movement as if it were dead...as if the only motivator to write open source software is to get a job with an artificially low salary.

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> Mega-racist? What? Lost me a bit there.

I assume that was mostly a thinly-veiled jab at ESR; who is a racist and generally a giant asshat, IMO; but it probably isn't worded in the best way when taken out of context of the paragraph preceding it since it sounds like the speaker is conflating ESR with the Free software people (who I also tend to disagree with on a great many things but for different reasons). At the very least, I wouldn't associate libertarianism with the high-level FSF types.

Yes, I was referring to ESR, who is mega libertarian and mega racist, and a large part of 'open source' rather than 'free software.'

I wish you had made a stronger distinction between freedom and zero-price.

I don't see it as freedom vs. price, I see it as ethical position vs. cost reduction. That said, you're right that I could have gone into it further, but this was a spoken interview over lunch, so it's not as tight as it could be, and this magazine is also not for programmers, so it's a little harder to dig into the details.

It's true that the free software movement isn't dead, but the open source movement has taken the fore as being socially significant. Furthermore, in many programming communities, preferring the GPL over BSD is something that will get you a _lot_ of hate.

I don't think choosing a permissive license and considering yourself a member of the free software movement are mutually exclusive.

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