🚀 go-pugleaf

Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@mit.edu> writes:

>> Have you read <URL:http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/dat.html>? I think
>
>I think the proposed system is terrible, DATs should not be taxed at
>all. Of course, I am a libertarian and believe that what the
>government does is supposed to protect the rights to life, liberty and
>property exclusively, even if the citizens might want otherwise.

A self-contradictory ideology:

(1) it needs an immensely strong collective will to be enforced, yet
    it negates all collective values.
(2) it declares certain individualistic values holy and is cynical about
    everything else.  it is for rigid moralists without morals.	
(3) while professing to worship The Market and The Evolution, libertarians
    need a strong-armed state to build an artificial concept of intellectual
    property.
(4) market economics works for the distribution of tangible goods.  It doesn't
    produce OpenSource information, nor most of the other values that make
    society (and the individuals in it) thrive.

>: Use a survey system to measure the extent of copying of each musical piece. 

>Could possibly work for software. Here are a few reasons:

You meant "couldn't", I guess.

...

I agree with the reasons you give.
What RMS proposes is very far from perfect.
It might even lead to plagiarism and, as a reaction against it, code hoarding.
Still, something similar is practised in most countries in the case of music
(e.g. the GEMA in Germany collects a tax and distributes it to music authors).
No matter what scheme you choose, you will have a hard time making it perform
as poorly as The Market in informational matters.

Here is what I would propose:
Start out from a well documented public bid system, make everything
documentation driven.
Managment from above through a credible institution like the FSF, as long as
it maintains its credibility.
Control from below through a peer review system in which anyone can vote who
passes examinations to prove that he has understood the relevant 
documentation.

This is as democratic as one can get in practise.  Just "substituting the
incompetent many for the corrupt few" (B.Shaw) just won't work.  I am not
speaking here about universal elections but about a specialised
administrative area where a check against abuse of administrative power is
needed.  The "incompetent many" are incapable of providing a balance, rather
they are capable of making power slide away from the administrators into
the hands of some private opinion manipulators, just another group of
"corrupt few".

--
Hartmut Pilch
http://www.a2e.de/phm/