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Re: [ox-en] Re: "At Cost"

Stefan Seefeld wrote:

Patrick Anderson wrote:

Are you saying the GNU GPL is unimportant to the current and future
health of the Free Software movement except only as a psychological
carrot?



No. I'm saying that in our current economical context everything gravitates
around 'property'. The GPL uses this concept as a weapon to break out of
this confinement. I.e., in using the current legal / economical framework,
it transcendents it.
However, you seemed to argue very much within the bounds of that model /
vocabulary, and, as many others, try to explain the world purely in those
terms.


The reason I confine my argument to the somewhat brutish concepts of
property ownership and contract law is because those avenues are
realistic 'handles' or 'footholds' or maybe even think of them as a
way to form a 'petri dish' that we can then use in Juijitsu manner (as
RMS's GNU GPL does with Copyright) to work against those that
currently use ownership in immoral ways to subjugate others.

Instead of simply condemning property rights and any Terms of
Operation that may be enforced through that ownership, I am trying to
use them to our advantage by:

1. Recognizing that owners RULE.  When there is a question as to who
has the final say, it all boils down to ownership.  It is easy to be
angry about ownership, and so many want to eliminate it entirely (such
as saying "ownership is theft"), but ownership in and of itself is not
the actual problem - just as Copyright in and of itself is not the
actual problem.  We all know the GNU GPL could not be enforced without
copyright, so why be upset about utilizing property law?  It is not
even a new concept; it is just syndicalism.

2. Admitting that each step in the GNU 'immaterial' revolution hinges
on some person willing to invest (for software that investment is
primarily the time and effort toward programming) in production and
then sell or give away the product to a user while insuring the
'immaterial' sources (the source code) are available to that same user
even if that user does not have the skills needed to operate (program)
those sources.  The reason this is so important is because it allows
the consumer to always "go around" the would-be Capitalist because the
consumer has "at cost" access to the 'virtual' Capital called
"source-code".

3. The GNU 'material' revolution will require investment both in labor
AND in any 'physical' Capital that is too expensive or just
meaningless to own by a single person.  This co-owned Capital (the
physical 'sources') can be constrained analogous to the GNU GPL's
requirements that perpetuate User Freedom.  The contract (or maybe a
corporate "Terms of Operation") applied to those collective holdings
must somehow insure users (consumers) gain "at cost" access to the
physical sources of production.

4. One way to insure consumers gain access to the physical sources of
production (the Capital or "Means of Production) is to treat all price
above cost (profit) as an investment from the consumer who paid it so
that current and future users become the literal owners of that
production while profit (price above cost) approaches zero [for when
every consumer has sufficient ownership in the physical sources of
production, while they must pay any real costs (including wages), they
cannot pay profit - for the own the product even before it is
produced.

Your peer,
Patrick
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de
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