[Solar-general] Leyendo Hacking Capitalism

[Nicolás Reynolds]

El 23/10/10 04:40, Nicolás Reynolds dijo:
> Las cursivas son mías (//)
> 
> "Open Source does not, however, demand that the open license is attached
> to derivatives of the original code. By removing the 'viral' feature of
> GPL, Open Source provides firms with a back-door for appropiating code.
> Software licensed under Open Source can re 'ripped, mixed, and burned'
> and released under copyright. That is how Mozilla Public License was
> intended to work for Netscape. This is what repeatedly happens with
> software licensed under the term of the Berkeley Software Distribution
> (BSD) license. In Marxist terms, Open Source licenses can be described
> as an /organisational principle for systematising 'primitive
> accumulation', by which is meant theft, of the social labour/ taking
> place in developing communities and in the commons." (pp 37-38)
> 
> 
> "The ultimate prize for companies involved in the hacker movement is to
> engage a pool of gratis labour in one end of the balance sheet and to
> sell the output in the other end with no discount. It's a
> 'have-your-cake-and-eat-it' business model. If a company sets out to
> make money in this way it can't advertise its intent since most
> developers refuse to contribute to projects under such terms. Often it
> is pulled off as a one-off violation against the terms of the free
> license. Despite occasional baddies, most companies have come to the
> conclusion that they have more to gain in the long run by playing by the
> book. While this fact is a sigh of relief to FOSS project leaders, the
> same remark looks entirely different from a Marxist vantage point. /To a
> Marxist it suggests that a more systematic way of exploiting labour has
> been found./ Our critique must therefore not stop at the companies that
> violate the free licenses, or else we will fail to detect subtler forms
> of exploitation that sidesteps the direct point of sale." (pp 40)

"The version of the Creative Commons license were the artist preserves
rights over commercial uses of her creation works in exactly the same
way. Ironically, the open-ended invitation to a pool of unpaid
contributors pared with a fee for commercial uses are often wrapped up
in an ideological 'let the business pay, it serves them right'
mentality. The foresightedness of the General Public License is
underlined by that it does not permit discrimination of any kind of
uses, not even commercial uses. It radically annuls exclusion as a
concept and becomes all the more threatening to the world of commerce by
not excluding it." (pp 41)


"Ironically, the deployment of computer technology has been decisive in
degrading the work elsewhere in the economy. [...] In the 1970s, baking
was an endeavour coupled with physical effort and toil in a hot and
sometimes hazardous milieu. On the upside, baking required artisanship
and rewarded the baker with some satisfaction. In the modern work
environment, computerised ovens oversee the process of baking. It is
clean, user-friendly, comfortably tempered, and, by any objective
measurement, more 'civilised'. But the employees are left with no clue
about how to bake bread. They only know how to push a few buttons and to
call a technician when the bakery machinery breaks down. [...] /The
growth of the software sector, which is providing exciting new jobs for
computer programmers, rests in no small part on the usefulness of
software as a means for deskilling the workforce in other sectors./"
(pp. 45)


"The dream of managers to build away workers' discontent through
black-box technologies has continuously been frustrated by hacking.
[...] There is no easy way to deprive 'knowledge workers' of knowledge
and still have them working." (pp. 46)


"The radicalism of the FOSS development model springs exactly from the
distance it places between 'doing' and the wage relation. Hackers are
contributing to radical social change because they prevent the labour
market from being the sole determinant over the allocation of
programming resources in society. As a consequence, the economic
rationality and instrumentality of technological development can not be
taken for granted anymore, at least not in the computer sector. The
model for developing technology invented by hackers is guided by the
most non-instrumental of human activities: the play-drive. [...] The
fact that the hacker movement has partially been recuperated by capital
/does not falsify hacking as a radical praxis/, unless we badly want to
think so. The hacker movement is in continuation with more than two
hundred years of labour struggle." (pp 49)


"The narrative of orthodox historical materialism corresponds with some
very popular ideas in the computer underground. It is widely held that
the infinite reproducibility of information made possible by computers
(forces of production) has rendered intellectual property (relations
of production, superstructure) obsolete. The storyline of
post-industrial ideology is endorsed with a different ending. Rather
than culminating in global markets, technocracy and liberalism, as
Daniel Bell and the futurists would have it; hackers are looking forward
to a digital gift economy and hightech anarchism." (pp 54)



-- 
Salud!
Nicolás Reynolds,
xmpp:fauno en kiwwwi.com.ar
omb:http://identi.ca/fauno
blog:http://selfdandi.com.ar/
gnu/linux user #455044

http://librecultivo.org.ar
http://parabolagnulinux.org
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