Hi Jason, First, let me tell you a little about a younger version of myself. Young Rob was raised in a culturally conservative climate where "commie" was the worst kind of slur you could sling at someone, to the point where "commie" and "bad" were interchangeable in sentences. And REAL commies could not fathom the superiority of our economic and political processes due to some inherent flaw in their DNA. And Young Rob knew this because he lived in rural Minnesota and when he turned on the TV to watch the evening news, the news he and everyone else who was watching TV at that moment in time were seeing - it was in fact the news from Fargo (NOT the SIN CITIES!). That obviously meant culture and intellectual thought flowed from Fargo the way it did from Rome at the height of another great civilization and empire. Years later Young Rob learned of localized television markets and marveled at his ignorance and ethnocentrism, but slept soundly at night knowing his contempt for commies was still justified.. Linux and capitalistic ideals. I think Linux isn't quite the right context for a conversation about Capitalism and choice. I think Linux is a very useful context when you talk about distributed software engineering and project management and the power of the GPL. But I think the concepts that are more applicable to the ideas you're talking about are Freedom, the Gnu Public License, and the Noosphere. First off, when I talk about Freedom, I'm talking about choice. Capitalism is often conflated with the concept of freedom because you are considered "free to make a profit". But not everyone's freedom's are being protected in a capitalistic/"free-market" society - especially in a society where the political parties are proxies for corporate interests who insist that "freedom to make a profit" is "the most important freedom". As you noted, you have a lot of freedom and choices in the Linux world, and that's thanks to the GPL, which is preventing people from taking choices away from you. It was a lack of choice and freedom that inspired Stallman to come up with the GPL in the first place. For Stallman, it was the lack of choice regarding the software running on a printer he owned. As an aside - on a personal note, I find it ironic that one of the things I hate the most - copyright - has done the most good for our society with respect to protecting people's choices about contributions they make to FOSS projects. Anyway - the GPL. It does world good, because it keeps people's contributions in the public domain. Now take a step back and look at the number of people who have contributed hours upon hours of effort to the public domain via the GPL for no economic gain and ask yourself "Why would they do that?" (Because they're stupid communists! HA! :) ). Well, maybe look at this question from a historical context, because now becoming a major contributor to a FOSS project can very easily lead to a job offer because a lot of the big FOSS projects have corporations sitting behind them selling services at an enterprise level. So - take away the "a very long job interview" angle and what are you left with? Why are people motivated to interact and contribute on these projects? Eric Raymond realized there was an id-friendly ego-stroke dimension to it all as well. He coined the term "noosphere" and described some of the motivations for developer activity on these projects from the point of view of psychology and sociology in a paper entitled "Homestead the Noosphere". I found it to be a very interesting read, and I think you would too if you haven't read it yet. Especially since I think it speaks to some of your motivations for working on Swift Linux. http://catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/ Once you're done with that, I would suggest you check out "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", which relates the FOSS development model to the Microsoftian (among other corporations) models. http://catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/ Enjoy! -Rob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20111017/42bdc090/attachment.html>