Escrúpulos Una piedra en la conciencia del software libre, calidad y la vida misma

Although I'm not born or raised in such a brute political climate as you, your thoughts on free software echoes mine. The difference being that I don't develop anything, I use and help others use free software as well.

you have a critical consciousness seldom discussed in foss, i seriously congratulate you, although you have had to learn it bitterly from history first. now what i miss a bit here is the fact that foss today is not only a bit but in large parts (and still growing) used for capitalistic profit by large companies.

i especially like to emphasize here not only the ones seeable like oracle, novell or even google, which is a special case, but also all the other big ones like enron, gm, ... which are not that seeable. they all can use foss internally, even ripping parts as they like, to optimize their production (which is their property) for free and they don't have to and won't ever give sth. back, while software gets more and more important in production. in fact they actually had to pay developers e.g. from microsoft to do the job before, while now they take unpayed labour. google has been in criticism for some time to actually circumvent foss by not being a software vendor, but sell only the services around software which is largely contributed by the foss world, but does give back nothing of its actual core technological achievements, its heavily linux based search cluster technology.

now you claim that foss is an intelligble structure which actually guarantees that foss is not misused but benefits everybody in the end and it is therefore an easy political action to provide freedom for you... have you ever thought about the american military infrastructure to use foss to bomb and kill other people at this very moment? how do you think about a simple license which claims nothing more than to refuse any property on this software while it is actually ripped by the unbalanced world of property around it?

you say one cannot abondon property and cite rousseau, but why not keep a critical mindset and actually reflect historical materialism in its many forms and ask what property is and where its unproportional growth, called capital, comes from?

i'm a person who tries to share your problems and concerns and recognizes you as a person of the same world wide society in todays economical processes and still accepts that there might be large differences in our consciousness. i hope you don't get me wrong, i am not proposing (and not denying) easy left-wing political action, i am proposing critical reflection as a basis for people to come together and understand todays economical cooperation in its capitalistic form better.
at the very moment we as a world wide society understand this process (which no one alone can do as it involves so many people, both being subjects and objects of the process) we can decide what we do and leave capitalism as unselfdetermined bloody history behind us by doing what we already do best today, cooperate for each others richdom and freedom.

pete

p.s. i understand your political concerns as political discussions in foss are largely banned and imo relatively unreflected today. i am also a contributor to the kde codebase btw. but i have problems to see it as a path towards general "freedom" anymore... i still use and like it though and i propose it as an example of an alternative to capitalistic production of wares.

Nice text! I think that it would be the best situation for everybody if there would be only Free Software and Free Knowledge. (even for economy in long term - a word most companies do not seem to know)

-- The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
Jean Jacques Rousseau

We do not want to remove ownership or money. That would be impossible without even more wars. But for software and knowledge we have a real chance to free them. Do not forget that the polity has to help us: Software patents were introduced and there is more and more academical research paid by the states without being published for everybody. These are unfair possibilities for companies and they are even bad for economy.

The User