Books: CATB: reviews and ideas

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 * ISBN: 978-0-596-00108-7
 * Publisher: O'Reilly
 
+## Review
+
+While Raymond has inumerous insights on the dynamic of the free software
+communities, he got political economy wrong, including, but not only by:
+
+* Chosing to focus on Lockean philosofical considerations.
+* Putting altruism as a mode of appearance for an egotistical reward strategy.
+
+Reading this book years after the "Open Source Revolution" has begun, the whole
+"Open Source X Free Software" debate looks even more important than what sometimes
+were put as a metaphysical, esoteric dispute. Going beyond the requirement that
+a software work is made available giving the "four freedoms", this debate puts
+basic questions about the underlying production process all how societies chose
+to divide labour and share wealth.
+
+More than ever before this debate has huge importance and implications, given
+our current state of affairs where economic models such as "freemium",
+"opencore" and [siren servers](/books/sociedade/who-owns-the-future) are
+privatizing and concentrating the notion of property, i.e, transforming even
+personal property in a "service": you don't own your gadget or content like
+music you purchase, because of DRM, EULAS and the inability to repair your
+stuff, see the iRepair movemnt.
+
+Raymond assumes that "the veredict of history seems to be free-market capitalism
+is the globally optimal way to cooperate for economic efficiency" which, besides
+being an "end of history"-type fallacy -- as we didn't tried yeat many, many
+possible economical systems, but only very few --, has wrong assumptions about
+what is "optimal", "cooperation" and "efficient": just look about resource
+depletion, absurd wealth concentration by the extremelly rich and lack of
+basic dignity for most of human population, not to mention animal/nature rights.
+
+Capitalism is based in the need that something is scarce, if not naturally then
+let make it artificial scarce. So there's no way a capitalist business will
+sustain itself by giving everything free as in software -- as it's anyway out
+of question that it will give anything free as in beer.
+
+So while the bulk of Raymond ideas are revolutionary in the sense that capitalism
+needs to constantly revolutionize itself, fade away in diminishing returns or
+go to war mode -- when accumulated production is fanatically destroyed, it does
+not offers insights for the main issue of how to replace capitalism which by
+the previous definition is inequality-producing machine.
+
+Embracing open source as a capitalism moto sounds like being a hacker until
+page two, which is a prevailing ideology of the Silicon Valley elite, which
+sounds much more a meritocracy than hacker culture. We should question things
+instead of taking assumptions for granted.
+
+That's curious, because Raymond cites Buckminster's Fuller "ephemeralization"
+concept in the opening words of his "The Magic Cauldron" essay, which could
+be explored to a new dimension if economics and politics are understood also
+as technological apparatus we use to live better. An ephemeralization, as
+Raymond explains, is "technology becoming both more effective and less
+expensive as the physical resources invested in early designs are replaced
+by more and more information content" (page 115).
+
+So it's clear when Raymond makes assumptions he is actually making a choice on
+capitalist markets and conservative politics (I don't like to use the term
+libertarian: it causes confusions as it means different things on different
+cultures).
+
+If we change the assumptions, we can build different, new economies and
+politics with other different emergent properties, like those based on values
+of emancipation and solidarity. There are other Magic Cauldrons for the Free
+Software spell.
+
+## Ideas while reading the book
+
+* Hipothesis: sunstainability of "Open Source" economic model in Brazil was mostly embraced
+  by the government, by an army of free lancers and by a small number of business; while
+  open source is widely used in the country, it's mostly on the free rider mode: everyone
+  using an open stack but develops unpublished code (either closed source os lazilly left
+  out of public sight) or "poor gifts" in the expression of Raymond himself.
+
 ## Phenomenology
 
 * Linus Law: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (page 30);
@@ -135,3 +208,7 @@ What about Linus behavior, then?
     version, I'll use it''—and to give credit where credit is due.
 
     -- 91
+
+## References
+
+* [Homesteading the Noosphere](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/).