Re: Free software, proprietary software and Stalin

[Arun Sharma <adsharma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2000 at 09:58:10PM +0530, Raj Mathur wrote:
> An interesting one for those who equate Free Software (a la RMS) with
> Communism.  The author states (and quite convincingly) that the
> proprietary software model is closer to the Russian state under
> Stalin.

I'm far from convinced. The problem with this article (and many others)
is that they treat communism as a bad word. That's just a tribute to
the capabilities of American media propaganda.

Secondly, at no stage does the author define communism or its central
ideas. He just compares some attributes of communism - centralized
planning - in this case, to compare with proprietary software. Even a
democracy like India has centralized planning.

The paragraph about intellectual property is ridiculous. There can be
no IP in a communist country - also the belief of the Stallman school.

I also find "freedom" = capitalism, communism = authoritarianism, equation
a bit naive.

I still maintain that Stallman has abused the word "freedom", but in
really consistent ways :-)

Webster's defines "communism" to be:

1 a : a theory advocating elimination of private property b : a system
in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed

And Stallman's ideology - that all software should be free and there is
should be no proprietary software - by definition, software that is 
someone's property, matches the above definition of communism very well.

	-Arun