http://maxkeiser.com/2011/02/12/ayn-rand-is-why-america-sucks/
Max Keiser: The autocrats tearing up the US economy; Obama, Bernanke,
Geithner, Dimon and Blankfein (and famously, Alan Greenspan) to name a
few, ascribe to Ayn Rand’s theory of ‘objectivism.‘
This is poppycock that has about as much relevance as L. Ron Hubbard.
If the the US entrepreneurial class followed this tripe we would have no
P2P, Linux, Open Source, iTunes, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin,
Wikipedia, Wikileaks, DemocracyNow.org, NASA, a triumph in WWII, or the
NFL (and the Super Bowl). All of which rely on collectivist ararchism,
not isolationism. This movie is like, 50 years out of date. It’s the
philosophy of a weenie waving America from the 50′s that liked to invade
other countries with fiat money and call it ‘soft imperialism’ and sell
them soft ice cream and soft porn (like Taylor Swift in this movie).
Ayn Rand’s an asshole and her philosophy defines assholedom in America.
What would Ayn Rand think of open source?
http://darkmattermatters.com/2009/07/06/what-would-ayn-rand-think-of-open-source-you-can-vote/
Rand originally titled Anthem as “Ego” and you can
definitely tell why. It is about a futuristic world where people are
kinda back in the dark ages technologically-speaking, and live in a
collective where people have numbers rather than names, are assigned
jobs for life, and have forgotten the word “I” (yes, totally annoying…
in the first ten chapters, the main character uses the royal “we” to
refer to himself).
It seems like Ayn Rand has been back in the news
lately, and I’ve seen her name bandied about in political arguments
quite a bit, especially regarding healthcare reform. So it made me
think, if Ayn Rand’s core philosophy was about maintaining the supremacy
of the individual, what she calls “rational self-interest,” and she
rejected the idea that the collective good should be put before the good
of the individual, what would she think about the open source movement?
After all, I used to remember seeing stories with proprietary companies referring to open source as socialism
all the time, although it doesn’t seem to happen as much these days.
More and more of the biggest companies are embracing open source
software and the concept of open source is more mainstream than ever.
So surely Ayn Rand would hate open source, right? Not so fast. Here are two good reasons why Ayn Rand might totally dig open source:
1. EGO
The original title for Anthem gives a hint at the first reason. In the extremely socialistic, Borg-like
world Ayn creates in the novella, no one maintains any individuality at
all, people don’t even have real names, and they serve the will of the
state with every minute of their day. There is zero tolerance for
individual pursuit or achievement.
In the open source world, there is great tolerance of ego. In fact,
one could even say that individual pursuit of glory and discovery might
be at the very heart of what makes open source work. In an open source
world, developers can work on any projects that interest them. They can
ignore the projects that don’t interest them, even if their talents
applied there would help the common good tremendously.
And the open source movement loves its superstars, the people who
have made it to the top of the meritocracy through good work and good
ideas. These are the people who are swarmed at conferences– I’ve even
seen people ask for autographs from some of the top developers at Red
Hat.
Open source celebrates the role of the individual at every turn.
Perhaps Ayn Rand would view open source as a tool to organize rationally
self-interested people into groups sharing common interests and
motivations.
2. FREEDOM
Ayn Rand strongly believes the individual should never sacrifice his
freedom, to government or other men. The open source movement strongly
protects the freedoms of not only its developers, but its users as well.
In fact, pre-dating open source, Richard Stallman, the founder of the
free software movement, defined these basic freedoms back in 1986 that
still hold true in the open source world:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
While I think Ayn would probably chafe at the “help your neighbor”
and “whole community benefits” bits, the overall concept of these
freedoms is that, as an individual, you can pretty much do what you want
with the code: look at it, use it, modify it, redistribute it.
Perhaps this focus on individual freedoms for users makes open source
even more palatable to an Ayn Rand worldview than proprietary software
would be. After all, proprietary software actually tries pretty hard to
restrict some of your individual freedoms.
I went to Google to see if anyone else was making a connection
between Ayn Rand and open source. There are a few interesting links. My
favorite: it turns out that a writer for The Atlasphere, an Ayn Rand fanboy site, came to a similar conclusion in this blog post from last year. A quote:
Since open-source software is
available free of cost, most people outside the movement — and within it
— mistakenly see it as an altruistic undertaking.
Quite a few of them have even forgotten that it is not intended to be free as in “free beer” but free as in “freedom of speech.”
Either way, most of them fail to
realize that there is an individualism at its core. And it is this
spirit, not altruism, which lies at the heart of the open source
movement.
So that makes two of us… anyone else have a view on what Ayn might think about open source?
Atlas Shrugged Review Trailer
Ayn Rand exposing her deep racism and hatred for non-techno-bot boot licking clowns like herself
