Relative to the background population, an extraordinarily high number of free software central figures are openly socialists. (This is something you can easily verify for yourself).

I have personally corresponded with some of the more well-known open-source advocates, and when I have pointed out the socialist aspects of it, the reaction is pretty uniformly “So what?”

I think what is particularly deceitful about free software is the notion that it’s a bunch of highly skilled people donating their time freely to the creation of cheap, readily available, high-quality software.

Early on, something about free software didn’t add up to me. Having worked in the software industry for over 25 years, I am quite aware of how expensive it is to develop software. It is simply not possible to do in the publicly declared model of how open software is supposed to be operating. How are these people earning a living? Some of the them are openly living quite well, and that money has to be coming from somewhere.

Randomly selecting a few open software engineers who were relatively widely known, I did some research to find out how it was they actually made their living. A relatively small percentage simply work for regular commercial companies in their day job and then work on free software in their own time. In other words, they are drawing a livelihood from the very industry that they’re damaging.

Most of the major notables are, in fact, paid to work on free software. But they’re simply not paid as regular employees of the companies that are subsidizing them. Sometimes they are funded by government grants (and frequently not the United States government) and sometimes they are funded wholesale by corporations that have a vested interest in damaging the competition by software “dumping”. If a company openly flooded the marketplace with below-cost-of-production-software, they would be subject to antitrust violations. By actively damaging their competition by ruining their competition’s marketplace indirectly through the “legitimately” fronted open software organizations, such companies perform their industrial sabotage indirectly and yet just as effectively.

Socialism doesn’t really work, regardless of how much certain people wish that it would. Open software engineers are actually well-paid dupes (or more likely, are well aware of what they’re doing), actively working to destroy one of the few industries that America still controls. They don’t even have the decency to actually do it for free like real socialists (and like the lying PR claims they are doing); they’re being well-paid to do the damage they’re doing. Look into it yourself and see how the well-known open software engineers are managing to pay their bills.

Some advice for mindnumbingly stupid people such as yourself: anytime you think you see some form of socialism actually working, take the time to look a little closer. You’ll inevitably find that there is something deeper and more complicated going on and that the socialist system is being artificially supported one way or another by some group that has a vested interest in doing so.

I can never decide what angers me more, people arrogant enough to attempt to foist socialism on the rest of us or the people stupid enough to believe that it would be a good thing and that it might actually work. The only reason this game is working at all is because of the unique peculiarities surrounding software. The only resource being openly subsidized is human resource hours which are notoriously difficult to track. If some hardware equivalent of the jerk face open software organizations tried to pull the same stunt, they’d rapidly go out of business because of fabrication costs. Software is one of the only products out there who’s fabrication costs can effectively be reduced to hours spent.

SCA