White and Wild by wilshire|oneThe commie smear against open source
“There are days on this beat when I fear I’m covering politics, not business.
It happens when the proprietary companies trot out their FUD that open source is somehow socialist, communist, as pink as its programmers’ underwear.
Because proprietary companies will always spend more of their money on marketing than open source outfits, it pops up regularly in the best of places, such as at Time Magazine recently. Or Microsoft sends CEO Steve Ballmer to London, so he can rant about how his lawyers are going to make all Linux users pay Microsoft for their stuff.
It’s nonsense.
This is not “the gift economy,” as Justin Fox calls it in Time. This is people taking advantage of the fact that the Internet has no distribution costs, which means marketing costs can also sink to zero. No ads in Time doesn’t make you a communist.
But as with political smears, the key to advocates making this stick doesn’t lie in the facts, but in their willingness to keep saying the same thing, louder and louder. My history professors equated that kind of behavior with Leninism, but maybe Fox didn’t take that class.”
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