I find it interesting that he contrasts free software with open source as "ethical position vs. cost reduction", apparently without ever considering cost reduction as an ethical position. (Enabling people to do things for less cost seems (to me), to be at the heart of any non-zero-sum strategy for improving the world. Otherwise you're just re-shuffling the same cards that have already been dealt.)
I also thought it was curious that he's advocating for capturing 100% of the value you create, apparently not considering the value he gets from other people without paying them.
This didn't resonate with me. It made me a little curious, but left lots of "How did you get to that conclusion?" questions. Any recommendations on what his best writing is?
(Helped me realize why writing opensource never appealed to me: the respect of my peers is even worse motivator for me than money. I rarely enjoyed the company of other programmers, due to the toxic culture we replicate. Caused some minor problems when I "led" a team of them; needed to care for them despite disgust at their cowardly, sociopathic acts. My interest kept returning to their far more marginalized coworkers.)
To me the difference in his worldview (as it relates to cost reduction and ethics) versus yours is mostly about theory vs practice.
In theory, freeing people from labor as a necessity is a good thing where we all gain time to pursue our creative passions instead of putting in 40-80 hours as wage slaves; in practice (based on economic trends and prevailing contemporary political views that seem unlikely to shift in the near term), it appears to be hurling us towards something vaguely like the society that was presented in the movie "Elysium"
Lots of this stuff is just very basic Marx 101. With a little bit of Foucault / Deleuze thrown in. Most things here are not my own ideas, they're just the application of the three thinkers above.
> apparently not considering the value he gets from other people without paying them.
9 times out of 10 when I see some "controversial" (for HN) economic/political post that I totally agree with, it was posted by user steveklabnik. That aside, I have to admit I still prefer Go over Rust.
In any case, very interesting interview.
I'd love to see more like this even if the subject was someone on the opposite end of the political/economic spectrum from me, I found it much more interesting than the typical padded puff-pieces "What Hacker XYZ uses to hack with" (spoiler: probably a MacBook, you bunch of Apple-sellouts!).
Hehe, thanks. I do often think about how my posts here are perceived. It's weird being an anti-capitaist, hanging out on message boards that are, in many ways, at a center of capitalism.
> It’s not universally bad — it’s really cool that you can get all this software for free. But, value is being generated from your labor and it’s not being captured by you, and that’s unsustainable.
A useful alternative perspective on open source and I hope people will pay attention.
Unionization is something I certainly hope can someday happen for programmers.
I think this touches on some very serious unresolved issues we have in society.
Anti-capitalism is a reaction but not a solution. More egalitarian sharing-based attempts at organization have generally also resulted in centralization and lack of freedom and equality just as much as capitalism has.
I think that the problem is creating a system that is efficient and holistic but also allows for diversity and evolution.
Whether you are coming at it from a fundamentally competitive angle or a cooperative one, you easily end up with centralization and hierarchy. Creating efficient holistic systems generally results in this hierarchy.
What we want is a system that is somehow holistic but also made up of diverse components.
I think that the problem we need to solve, or if it is solved then we need to starting promoting the solutions.
If anyone read this and has an answer to that question please let me know.
Notice the contradictory language used in describing what you want:
"creating a system that is efficient and holistic but also allows for diversity and evolution."
Effectively: I want things to be one thing that is the same, but also to be many things that change constantly. The truth is that this kind of small-scale logic breaks down when we talk about large systems. They can usefully be viewed, to take a page from Marx, as mediators of internal contradictions like this. Desires that pull in opposed directions.
It's in fact these contradictions that Marx, I believe, very effectively demonstrates cause ever more rapid and widespread crises like the financial meltdown of 2008 and the .com bubble 8 years before that as well as numerous global crises in the interim. He leverages a lot of historical and empirical data to demonstrate this and I would say reality has consistently validated this prediction. Its this crisis tendency that leads to an anti-capitalist position - clearly the system cannot effectively avoid disaster (it's now struggling to even remain stable for a decade). Therefore, we should really search for alternatives, what those are is not a ready-made answer and there's a lot of push back in attempting to experiment in the way necessary to discover them.
Its not small-scale logic. I have read Marx. He doesn't have all of the answers.
All of these crisis are not caused by a contradiction in thinking, they are caused by not comprehending and solving the true problem, which I have stated.
The reason this problem hasn't been solved is because it is extremely difficult, to the degree that it is easy for people to simply dismiss it as being contradictory goals.
Marxist thinking has led many times to a cooperative approach which has led to holistic hierarchical systems that were not diverse and flexible enough to cope with an evolving and distributed reality.
Capitalistic thinking also eventually leads to the same type of holistic hierarchical systems with the same problems.
I am not anti-capitalist, so I am sure Steve and I would disagree quite profoundly on many things.
However, one thing we both do agree on is the distinction between free and open source. I do not particularly care for open source, as it is a nice way to provide unpaid work for other people to exploit and make lots of of money off of without providing compensation of any form in return. That seems extremely unethical to me. However, I provide the bulk of my public software under GPL-derived licenses: if a company wants to use it, they need to publish the source so other may benefit. That is my price. Alternatively, if that is onerous, they can give me some cash.
I strongly believe that it's improper to take others work for gratis and not provide consideration in return - its also unethical to encourage an entire industry to contribute gratis work and build off of it for large piles of cash.
If you've read some of the alternative literature on capitalism you might think that profit is by definition providing "unpaid work for other people to exploit and make lots of of money off of". It's a rather clever inversion of private property rights that exploits the medium of commodity exchange - to pay someone a fixed wage for their commodity called labour time and exploit their produce to turn a profit.
Open-source is only an ethical perversion if you believe the above is a just system of compensation. To me the profit motive is a hinderance to progress and innovation as it requires subjugating everything to the need to produce a surplus - often eliminating whole extremely useful areas for human advancement as they are impractical in this regard. Case and point: no one paid Einstein to produce his innovation, he merely took a menial job that gave him time and means to produce it. That being said capitalists have certainly made money off of it - eg, GPS. We should be careful not to conflate the exploitation of innovations with the cause of them.
Remark: there are different theories of value. I don't buy into what, afaict, is known as the labor theory of value - "profit is by definition providing "unpaid work for other people to exploit and make lots of of money off of"".
Oh, other remark - the ethical perversion that MIT/Apache/et al allowed is that billions of dollars are made off those licenses, providing very excellent lifestyles to selected people, and there is no compensation ipso facto to the actual authors outside of (maybe) recognition in license.txt files hidden away on phones. Recognition does not (as a first order effect) help bills get paid (or a better life for author (those might be second order effects)), nor does it help the world in general (except for the product itself).
Consider the effects of open source on the economy (positive), and the fact that thousands of people do this for free, enabling companies to essentially get free labor (and then have the gall to want unpaid labor proof in interviews).
Stallman approaches this topic grounded as a question of ethics and morals, with an imperative to share information.
I approach the topic in three ways: "Am I taking this thought-stuff and making fat cash and not giving anything back to the person who made it?", and "Can the end user repair (or find a repair person) the product I have provided them?", and "If this is a good project, can it be maintained and recovered in thirty years time". I don't think anything but the GPL (and friends) gives that position.
You can also say to my position that it's terribly unethical to ask people in each company that wants to do X to do the same project (but duplicated for each company), rather than having an open source project that has liberal licensing and having the engineers share work. Wasting other people's lives is a harsh thing as well. :-)
I do find myself in many of the same communities as Steve, and in much the same starting position whereas I tend to get bored and leave things he puts in the effort to do something for the community.
I jointed Rust to write an ML project and contribute, I gave a talk on the philosophy of programming, I think I was speaking one conference behind him at one point too. And yesterday he opens metaphysics.io and I programmingphilosophically.com ...
It's interesting to see what could be with a little effort. And yet I still dilly dally and potter around.
"The free-software ethos and the founders of the open-source movement are mega-racist libertarian people, and so it’s always really weird to me that a bunch of Leftists are so into open source; it explicitly manifests capitalist social relations."
Mega-racist? What? Lost me a bit there.
It's weird to me that he speaks about the free software movement as if it were dead...as if the only motivator to write open source software is to get a job with an artificially low salary.
I assume that was mostly a thinly-veiled jab at ESR; who is a racist and generally a giant asshat, IMO; but it probably isn't worded in the best way when taken out of context of the paragraph preceding it since it sounds like the speaker is conflating ESR with the Free software people (who I also tend to disagree with on a great many things but for different reasons). At the very least, I wouldn't associate libertarianism with the high-level FSF types.
I don't see it as freedom vs. price, I see it as ethical position vs. cost reduction. That said, you're right that I could have gone into it further, but this was a spoken interview over lunch, so it's not as tight as it could be, and this magazine is also not for programmers, so it's a little harder to dig into the details.
It's true that the free software movement isn't dead, but the open source movement has taken the fore as being socially significant. Furthermore, in many programming communities, preferring the GPL over BSD is something that will get you a _lot_ of hate.
Just discovered Steve on Twitter yesterday so this is a coincidentally well timed article. What initially drew me to his Twitter account were the obvious references to Deleuze and Guatarri - specifically his reference to the concept of the body without organs (BwO) in his twitter handle. Glad to see a like-minded programmer coming to many of the same conclusions I've been reaching recently.
Me too! Really enjoyed your article applying the concept of the assemblage and (de-/re-)territorialization to software development. Just finished a reading of "Difference & Repetition" myself and have been working on applying some of his concepts from that book and ATP to programming as well. I think software is a particularly rich area for application. Excited to see where you go next and refreshed to see someone thinking in a similar vein :)
I wish Rust people (like Steve here) would stop saying that there's no new research in Rust. It's just totally 100% not true. Large parts of the Rust type system involve awesome new ideas. Additionally, as I said once to dherman, language design is _always_ research -- putting things together in a new way is basically all research is.
Regions as a general concept go back at least to FX-87 (in 1987 :). But the way the Rust type system works is quite different from Cyclone, for example. Cyclone, for example, treats memory in the heap quite differently than Rust, and doesn't have borrowing (at least not obviously).
But my more significant point is the second one, which is that novel language design is research, period.
Steve is a really great guy. He's super friendly and incredibly accessible. I've emailed or tweeted him a handful of times and he's always been very helpful. I don't agree with everything he says but he has turned me onto a lot of issues I didn't know anything about especially feminism.
