Quote of the day
Posted on February 21st, 2008 by Jackie Danicki
A Valleywag commenter, of all people, nails exactly what I find so baffling about the political bent of so many techies:
I never cease to be amazed when supporters of Open Source, Open Standards and the relative anarchy that such regimes allow turn to the government sector and want to do just the opposite: centralize everything.
It takes some kind of cognitive dissonance to realize the power of individual empowerment and a dynamic approach to technology, human connections, and life in general…and yet persist in the belief that centralized, politician-run totalitarianism (meaning that no area of life is left unregulated) is something to which we should aspire.
Filed under: Life
It’s about utopians who see things like profit and competition as inefficient. That if you spend money centrally, you get rid of those “inefficiencies” and we all enjoy code/information at lower prices than if the corporations were involved.
Of course, this only works if you forget about human nature - but remember, many programmers are weak on social skills. The strongest “political” advocates of open source that I’ve met (there are plenty of pragmatic users) were also weak on social skills.
There are some libertarian open source advocates like Eric Raymond. Personally, I use it for simple, capitalist reasons (which is also why I often use closed source code too).