Objectivism and Open Source

Shlomi Fish


                        
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Revision History
Revision 289528 September 2009shlomif
Corrected a lot of spelling/grammar/etc. problems.
Revision 282624 September 2009shlomif
Converted to DocBook/5, changed more text to Commonwealth spelling and made some other corrections (“a software”, “constitutional”, etc.).
Revision 159312 May 2008shlomif
Started keeping track of version. Changed the “book” schema to an “article”-based one. Changed more spelling to Commonwealth one. Changed the two-level of Ethics to “Ethical” and “Moral”.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The “open source” movement is perhaps the most important phenomenon in the software world today. Thousands of developers and millions of users worldwide create, maintain, support and use high-quality software packages, that are made available for everyone to use, modify and distribute. Many Objectivists may reject this movement on the premises of it being anti-Capitalistic in nature. The aim of this document is to show that they need not and should not.

This document will demonstrate that working on open source software is not anti-Capitalistic, and that it is also an objectively moral and healthy activity. It will explain why there is no dichotomy between the open source world and Objectivism, and why Objectivists can support it, without having guilt feelings of behaving un-Capitalistically.