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It's considered socialism among those in the developing community.
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The word Socialism is a broad term. There are different streams of socialism. On one end of the spectrum, there is the extreme form of socialism known as communism infamous for its stringent following of its ideology, which was practiced by countries such as the erstwhile USSR (present Russia) and currently by China and Cuba. And at the other end, there is the more humane form of socialism as practiced by countries such as India and Sweden. That is right, India is a sovereign socialist democratic republic nation as stated in the constitution of India.
And before any of you point at the problems faced by India, let me tell you most of those problems are due to its burgeoning population and should not be attributed to its socialist aspect. And as far as Sweden is concerned, it is ranked as the 4th least corrupt nation in the world. A clue that it's people lead contented lives. And Sweden enjoys an ultra low unemployment rate of around 4% which is the least in the European Union.
Simply put, socialism is a process of control of resources by a community or state in varying degrees. So the big question is does the Free Software movement enjoy any relation with socialist ideology ?
If you go by the definition of Socialism, I would say yes. The source code is open and is controlled by the Free software community at large. And it is the community which largely decides and dictates the direction of a software's progress. Each decision is taken through consensus and by interacting with its users. Though at times there is bound to be a lot of bickering and clash of egos, for the large part, the job gets done splendidly. And socialism works in the software realm when it is a massive failure when implemented in an extreme form (read communism) in real life is because unlike the resources in real life, software is a replenish-able resource. You can literally make millions of copies of your source code and distribute it to others free of cost and still you will be left holding the original copy of the source code.
Having stated my views about this topic, I came across this lengthy article which talked about the inherent link between Free software and socialism. What held my attention was the insidious way in which they had portrayed the 'X' in Linux with a hammer and sickle - the trademark of communist movement. If anything, Free software movement is far removed from the mess that is communism.
That's 100% voluntary. Totally different. Not to mention that I contribute my own open source code. I would not support the use of force to make programmers contribute to Apache for example.
The coders usually get something out of it too. As an open source contributor to a large project, you get a ton of publicity as well as the ability to charge an insane hourly rate since you are by definition the top authority on your project. Commercial sponsorships are also becoming the norm in the industry.
I use nothing but. If someone in the "community" wants to share and others are willing to use the software, that doesn't make it socialism. Without feedback, nothing would improve, same as it is with a business (and SHOULD be with our gov't, but that's a different topic). I don't see anything socialistic about it but I'm also not in the "developing community" so maybe my opinion doesn't matter anyway.
I use nothing but. If someone in the "community" wants to share and others are willing to use the software, that doesn't make it socialism. Without feedback, nothing would improve, same as it is with a business (and SHOULD be with our gov't, but that's a different topic). I don't see anything socialistic about it but I'm also not in the "developing community" so maybe my opinion doesn't matter anyway.
The public option was an option.
So what was the beef towards Obama's public option plan?
That's 100% voluntary. Totally different. Not to mention that I contribute my own open source code. I would not support the use of force to make programmers contribute to Apache for example.
The coders usually get something out of it too. As an open source contributor to a large project, you get a ton of publicity as well as the ability to charge an insane hourly rate since you are by definition the top authority on your project. Commercial sponsorships are also becoming the norm in the industry.
Government assistance is voluntary in most instances.
So what was the beef towards Obama's public option plan?
What are you talking about?
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