Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

Recent Items
 
Scoble Links: Overwhelm of the Solitary Connector
 
Don Knuth on Science as Art and Scholarship as Community Effort
 
Agreeing While Disagreeing
 
Addressing Customer Demands?
 
Crushing Supply-Push Under Demand-Pull
 
The fearful state of on-line students
 
The Final Page
 
Oh, the tragedy, the humanity: Donate Now (amazon link)
 
The Asia Disaster: Aiding the International Relief Effort
 
Tsunami - Earthquake - Supporting International Relief

Open Source: Taking Food from the Mouths of Capitalist Babies?

ACM News Service: The 'dotCommunist'.  I cringed when I saw the title of the article summarized in this news blurb.  Not that my title is any better, and I'm put in mind of David Weinberger's observations about tyrants high-jacking the terms of discourse.  And that reminded me that Bill Gates' classification of open-source advocates as innovation-commies shows me that neither of us has any idea what communist economics are (or innovation-capitalist economics, either).  I wonder if there are innovation-tyrants and who might be any.  I now see that the dotCommie tag was chosen by Eben Moglen himself, in authoring The dotCommunist Manifesto, so I guess the categorization was self-inflicted, unwise, sarcastic, or not.  I sense a certain degree of pride in the designation behind the tone of the article.  (I suppose what keeps me an innovation-proletarian is that I am uncertain of the spelling of bourgeoisie and am afraid to undertake its pronunciation in public.)

Unfortunately, no on-line access is indicated for Andrea Foster's 2005-03-25 Chronicle of Higher Education article on dotCommunists (and the subscription fee structure is startling, properly fleecing the academic-bourgeoisie from within, I suppose).  That's too bad because what interests me is the view of Steven Henry, who "believes proprietary and open-source software will exist alongside each other for quite a while, and says open-source software will not thrive unless licenses that fortify businesses' ability to integrate code from both free and commercial software are crafted."  The best I can find on a quick search are articles that tend to reject Henry's observations about open-source licenses.  If I find something more substantial, I will snag it somewhere.

posted by orcmid at 3/26/2005 11:38:00 AM