Eco's OS analogy

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

On Sun, 20 Jan 2002, Mike Weaver wrote:
> 
> From: Dave Monroe 
> 
> >Making Linux, what?  A sort of ecumenical liberation
> >theology?  Let me know ...
> 
> Nah, it's atheist communism/socialism attempting to sweep aside the capitalist 
> assumptions underpinning the modern mainstream Christian establishment.
> 
> The Free Software Foundation is the First International, the Open Source crew 
> is the revisionist ascendancy of the Second International ( Eric Raymond as 
> Bernstein), and Gnu/Linux the Third International. 
> Steve Balmer's description of Linux as a cancer on private intellectual 
> property is the launch of the Cold War...


I'm afraid Linux is as such something all too modest for any Messianism,
be it Hegelian/Christian or Marxist. (As is Linus himself, although when 
I audited him the second time some months ago - the first occasion took
place years ago, before his move to California - he HAD become much more
American and un-Finnish, performing in an alarmingly smooth, talkative
a-and relaxed way(!!)) Unlike the Gnostic truth-possessor parties above,
it is open [perhaps irritatingly, *exactly* as available to IBM as it 
is to EPN], immanent, not totally unlike the code of nature for Deists; 
without, however, the innate teleologism of the latter which connects 
them to the above parties. A welcoming Society of Friends as the Quakers
indeed, preferring to operate every bit as plainly and unflashily on the
shell level; yet without any Quakerian transcendence. A bare pragmatism
(on which there's little need to build stupid utilitarian ethics, though).


Heikki