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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> Live Free or Die! / Re: OT: Editorial on Corporate use of Open Source Software
Jared,
Well, OSS certainly has its problems (some promoters have resorted to stooping almost to the same level as MS marketing?: http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/metcalfe/990726bm.htm ), but there is something larger going on that I find fascinating.
As you may recall, some exec at microsoft recently accused OSS of being "anti-capitalist". I didn't forward it from my home account, but I have a link from a Linux site that contains a very interesting rebuttal, contrasting the corporate value system of MS with Linux/OSS by comparing both to Ayn Rand's libertarian (anti-statist) philosophy.
(meanwhile for resolute surfers:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=ayn+rand+linux+open+source+capitalism
, http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/response-to-bezroukov.html , http://www.softpanorama.org/OSS/index.shtml )
Based on my study of culture history, I would tend to agree with the argument in that article (if I remember, I'll forward the link tomorrow), at least in in the general sense that corporate technocapitalism is much more similar to the system of imperial mercantilism (statist economy) that was run primarily for the benefit of the aristocracy and ecclesiastics (high church hierarchy) in the days before participatory democracy (as originated via puritanism) came to be the norm.
In other words, corporations are like a modern aristocracy (actually the correct sociological term is "meritocracy" - se Robert Bella), and the "PC" movement (and government bureaucracy from which it arises) is like a modern secular religion (belief system), both of which tend to promote "non-sustainability" (consumerism).
Both corporate and govt "systems" (bureaucracies) operate, in conjunction if not harmony with each other, to limit the natural tendency for communities to FREELY organize and develop along "humancentric" lines. In both cases, the right of the people to determine their own fate, and to create local community dynamics ("good", "truth", "beauty") is being dangerously undermined by large "systems" that seek to "colonize" the "lifeworld" of the people (see Juren Habermas) according to the (nubalanced, overbearing) logic of the "systems" and the values (and *self interests*) of the "expert" elites that rule those "systems".
We are clearly in a period of human history where technology and globalism is driving individuals and social institutions to make hard, but important choices between democractic/participatory values and the false ideals of long entrenced, outmoded ideologies and value systems (of both "right" and "left"). Unfortunately, if one examines the efforts of "visionaries", such as Jon Postel, to engineer internet governance along "enlightened" lines (by inspiring a participatory organizational culture) so as to encourage a more responsible sense of "global citizenship", you can see the incredibly destructive nature of the forces that the bureaucratic "systems" can bring to bear in order to protect their "paradigms" and power bases.
John Taylor Gatto's explanation of these dynamics in a talk at the
(buddhist) Naropa Institute is available at the following web site.
If anyone ever wondered how the zen crowd and puritans might find
common ground, this is it. :) (linked from http://www.preservenet.com
, http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Gatto.html )
http://csf.colorado.edu/sine/transcripts/gatto.html
---excerpt---
John Taylor Gatto
The Neglected Genius of America:
The Congregational Principle and Original Sin
(Education and the Western Spiritual Tradition)
I'll be talking about three characteristics of American
Christian doctrine. When I say "American Christian
doctrine," the country, until the 1870s or 1880s, was
virtually exclusively Protestant and more than
Protestant -- it was made up of the independent and
dissenting minds of England and Germany, not the
[***]State[***] Church people.
You'll recall the Dalai Lama yesterday said that the
goal of Buddhism is happiness, and I think one sharp
dividing line between these two major faiths is that
the goal of Christianity has not been happiness except
incidently to other purposes.
The Congregational Principle
When the Puritans arrived in Salem in 1629, there were
no Anglican church officials around to approve the
selection of their church authorities. That would have
been mandatory in the State Church of England, so the
first congregation here took that responsibility
illegally into its own hands. That simple revolutionary
act subverted power that traditionally had belonged to
some certified expert and placed it into the hands of
people who simply went to church. The sole yardstick of
suitability for high office was that the seeker be the
choice of ordinary people whose only proof of competence
was joining a congregation which took religion
seriously. That was it.
History dubbed this quasi insurrection the Salem
Procedure, and for the next 231 years that simple
public shedding of traditional authority, which was an
act of monumental localism, challenged the right of
arrogant power to broadcast any centralized version of
the truth without argument. America became the only
nation in human history where ordinary people could
argue with authority without being beaten, jailed, or
killed, and that remains largely true in the world that
you and I live in today.
The best thing, I think, about the Internet so far is
that it shows signs of becoming a post-modern Salem
Procedure. In the face of widespread moral and
intellectual collapse in what is mistakenly called
public education, we re being asked once again to
patiently try a variety of expert solutions whether by
James Comer, Ted Sizer, Chris Wittle, the National
Education Association, or any of a large number of
fronts for institutional players. Some are honorable
men, some dishonorable men, but all clamoring to manage
the lives of children in various profitable mass
compulsion schooling schemes.
Plato once said, "Nothing of value comes from
compulsion," but pass that by for a moment and
concentrate on the new praetorian guard who claim the
right to drain all the children from the community like
pied pipers. They come from a very few selective
universities, from less than a dozen private foundations,
from the board rooms of about 30 global corporations,
from a handful of think tanks, from a few government
agencies whose operations are shielded from the view of
the public, and from various other national associations.
This is a body like the ephors in ancient Sparta who
ruled the public through fear from behind a screen of
dummy legislators.
...
As it is, we currently drown students in low-level busywork, shove them together in forced associations which teach them to hate other people, not to love them. We subject them to the filthiest, most pornographic regimen of constant surveillance and ranking so they never experience the solitude and reflection necessary to become a whole man or woman. You are perfectly at liberty to believe these foolish practices evolved accidently or through bad judgment, and I will defend your right to believe that right up to the minute the men with nets come to take you away.
Dis-Spirited Schooling
The net effect of holding a child in confinement for 12 years and longer without any honor paid to the spirit is an extended demonstration that the State considers the Western God tradition to be dangerous. And, of course, it is. Schooling is about creating loyalty to an abstract central authority, and no serious rival can be welcome in a school that includes mother and father, tradition, local custom, self-management, or God.
The Supreme Court Everson ruling of 1947 established the principle that the State would have no truck with spirits. There was no mention that 150 years of American judicial history had passed without any other court finding this fantastic hidden meaning in the Constitution.
...
Until you can acknowledge that the factual contents of your mind upon which you base decisions have been inserted there by others whose motives you cannot fully understand, you will never come to appreciate the neglected genius of Western spirituality which teaches that you are the center of the universe and that the most important things worth knowing are innate in you already. They cannot be learned through schooling. They are self-taught through the burdens of having to work, having to sort out right from wrong, having to find a way to check your appetites, and having to age and die.
The effect of this formula on world history has been titanic. It brought every citizen in the West a mandate to be sovereign, which we still have not learned to use wisely, but which offers the potential of such wisdom the moment we figure out a way to put the neo-aristocracy of global business, global government, and massive institutions back into the Pandora's box where they belong.
Western spirituality granted every single individual a purpose for being alive, a purpose independent of mass behavior prescriptions, money, experts, governments. It conferred significance on every aspect of relationship and community. It carried inside its ideas the seeds of a self-activating curriculum which gives meaning to time.
In Western spirituality, everyone counts. It offers a basic, matter-of-fact set of practical guidelines, street lamps for the village of your life. Nobody has to wonder aimlessly in the universe of Western spirituality. What constitutes a meaningful life is clearly spelled out: self-knowledge, duty, responsibility, acceptance of aging and loss, preparation for death. In the neglected genius of the West, no teacher or guru does the work for you, you must do it for yourself.
---end---
A very interesting "alternative/constructivist" approach which rejects false ideals and false utopias can be found at Amory Lovins' web site (see "Natural Capitalism"):
http://www.rmi.org/ (currently off line???)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=amory+lovins+rocky+mountain+institute
-
http://www.rightlivelihood.se/recip1983_3.html
regards,
ep
On 21 May 2001, at 13:26, Jared Still wrote:
Date sent: Mon, 21 May 2001 13:26:16 -0800 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> > > This is a very interesting editorial on corporate use of OSS. > > >http://www.dmreview.com/editorial/dmdirect/dmdirect_article.cfm?EdID=3436&issue=051801&record=1 >
...
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