LovesLife

Self-esteem is, fundamentally, self-confidence in your ability to live and be successful given the facts of reality. To have self-esteem, you must also know that you are capable of being good, and that you have a moral right to be happy. People make mistakes, even with perfect knowledge (in part because we can't predict the future). That is a fact of reality; making an honest mistake is an everyday fact of life. However, self-esteem is an emotional reward, so there may be cases where you need to remind yourself of the facts and of your approach and intentions. A mistake that costs the lives of others would be an example.

With the official CPI at 3.5%, and the shadowstats.com corrected CPI at 7%, we clearly are not in a deflationary spiral. For a more comprehensive rebuttal, see: http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php/20102-You-re-not-going-to-believe-this-Eric-Janszen

The whole sue-as-a-solution thing sounds much more Libertarian than Objectivist. The role of a proper government in the Objectivist sense is that it protects your rights. If you are being aggressed against, then your rights are being violated, and government should help -- such as in the form of objective laws. Being "sue-proof" is a symptom of a broken legal system. In a proper legal system, it should be cheap to sue. The reason it's expensive today is largely due to the reams and reams of regulations and exceptions. The idea with objective law is that it can be readily understood -- so suing and defending should both be cheap. It also diminishes the power of lawyers and even judges. The evidence is in the nature of the what it means for a monopoly to be coercive. Coercion requires the initiation of force -- which, in turn, can only be done legally with the cooperation of the State. If force is banned, there's nothing in principle to stop someone from trying to compete against a would-be monopolist. I don't know much about the early auto industry. Ayn Rand writes about the early rail industry in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and shows that government clearly caused the resulting monopolies. No. Corporations are legal constructs; they don't have any rights as such. I would add "due to the non-stop interference of government." It's impossible to have a real market in the midst of massive manipulation. Yes, though in different and often less severe ways. Central banks, fiat money and tax or regulatory policies can be used anywhere to create bubbles. I would say that 19th century America was improving at a faster rate than the America of today. In some ways, we are still coasting on the glory of those century-old improvements. We defend laissez-faire by noting than whenever freedom is increased in the world, people prosper. If people live there voluntarily, then it's fine. If they're coerced or defrauded in any way, then it's an illegal use of force, which has nothing to do with unregulated capitalism.

This gets into the whole "ethics of emergencies" thing. Basically the answer is yes, steal if you have to in order to survive -- but there are many, many things that one should be able to do before getting to that point. In addition, it's a mistake to base your moral code on situations like this. Morality is there to help us with day-to-day living. The unusual corner cases (most of which seem to focus around death in some form) are not the drivers.

Do you think rights somehow depend on how much you've invested? The idea behind patents says that yes, the second party can make a profit from their add-ons to the patent holder's ideas, but only if the patent holder agrees. The more important point is that the patent holder also worked to create the market. Why should the second inventor get to benefit from that market without compensation? Just like no one can take your house and improve it, because you will just sue them. The key feature of IP is not that it's anti-competitive; it's that it protects the rights of the inventor.

I don't think debt in and of itself is a bad thing, and it's certainly not indentured servitude. I do think that many people who buy homes buy them for the wrong reasons. They also often don't really understand the nature of the loan they are agreeing to. Here are a few key points: 1. In an unmanipulated market in an area with a relatively constant population, a home is a depreciating asset; you should expect it to go down in real (pre-inflation) value, not up. 2. The interest you pay on a variable rate mortgage can change! Before you sign, make sure you can afford the payments if they should increase to the highest rate allowed by the loan. 3. When deciding whether you can afford to buy a house, be sure to include all of the long-term operating expenses: insurance, property taxes and maintenance (including infrequent big-ticket items such as replacing a roof, repainting, recarpeting, refinishing floors, etc) 4. What would happen if you were out of work for a few months? It can happen if you get sick or get laid off. 5. How long are you planning to stay in the area and in that house? If less than about five years, you may come out better if you rent, due to the transaction costs involved in turning a house around. 6. The more of your income that goes to pay the mortgage, the higher the risk in the event something goes wrong. To avoid trouble, buy less house than you can afford. If you keep to principles like these, you can also make debt work for you -- for example, by paying the loan off with inflated dollars.

Are you saying that you think it's possible to choose to be happy, regardless of how you are living the rest of your life? If so, although I think that's a common view, in my experience it never worked very well. I might be able to "choose" (more like "pretend") to be happy for a short time, but I found it to only be a fake, temporary and unsatisfying kind of happiness. The way I live my life now, the "being happy" part of being happy is easy, and takes no effort at all. What did take effort was all of things that led to this point, such as consistently applying reason, productiveness, rationality, independence, integrity, honesty and justice in my life. But the actual happiness I found to be a consequence; an effect, not a cause. Likewise for self-esteem and pride; they are rewards, not primaries.

I am "rationally happy." That doesn't mean my life is perfect, because it's not -- but I seem to have a smile on my face most of the time anyway. It certainly wasn't always like that. I am proud of my accomplishments; I have solid self-esteem; I consider myself to have sound values and virtues. It's no surprise that when you put that together, I'm also happy.

I'm not an expert, but I've looked into it enough to have an opinion. Sure, you could start there. I don't want to hijack this thread, though.

Here's something I heard recently: If you think you have a right to force me to pay for your health care, then why don't you have a right to force me to pick your cotton?

Popper vs. Objectivism is an interesting subject. If you ever start a thread about it, I would be interested in participating.

Yes, absolutely. I find the majority of the people around me to be highly irrational in many parts of their lives -- and the closer you look, the more irrationality you often see. Many people also have their entire sense of self value and of their place in the world wrapped up in irrational ideas. Which means, if you challenge them, that you will quickly become an enemy, because you are threatening what they value most about themselves. Over the years, I've learned to generally keep my mouth shut, especially with family. I do a lot of "head nodding," but often keep my opinion to myself. Even when asked, I don't dive into details. When I do make comments, I try to keep them short and simple. I wish it wasn't that way, but for me, it's partly a survival thing. To offset that, I've found it very helpful to be involved in things like Objectivist blogs and several of the OList groups. OActivists, for example, can be a great way to express your political and economic opinions to the public, while getting support from other Objectivists. When I first joined ObjectivismOnline.net, I originally hoped it would fit in for me socially somehow, but unfortunately it doesn't. There are of course also a number of in-person social options, but the details depend heavily on where you live.

I agree that principles are contextual. However, the contextual exceptions need to be well defined. OK, so the principle there is that having a contract between a writer and a publisher is good; it's something you should want to do. However, you need to be careful, because the terms of the contract might be damaging if they aren't properly formulated. I agree with that. An equivalent statement about open source as a principle would be: open source is good; it's something you should want to do. However, you need to be careful, because there are certain types of open source that might be damaging. Do you agree with that formulation? I don't. The Unix kernel developers I was talking about didn't work at Microsoft. They lost their jobs because they helped to create an OS that was competitive with Unix, but which was free and open source. I have no objection to MS creating open source software and releasing it on Codeplex or wherever. I'll say it again: my objection is not to the concept of open source as such; it's to the irrationality of some of the people who participate in it.

I agree with this, but I was arguing a different point -- not about a moral principle, but the concept of open source as a principle. Very different.

OK. I'm not going to try to litigate the position here. You're saying if it doesn't violate the patent then it isn't illegal or immoral. Fine, I agree with that. My point is that there are people who believe that it does violate the patent and others as well. Many of the key supporters and distributors know about that, so not disclosing that to the people who use your product is immoral because it puts them at risk. Even with a potential infringement, there is still a risk that you will be sued and will incur legal costs or end up paying to settle. My point is that the ones who are guilty are immoral. Separately, I also believe that they are in the majority. I don't have first-hand knowledge of any distributors who discuss patent issues other than Novell with suse. If open source were valid as a principle, then I would expect to be able to always apply that principle, except in the context of things like physical force or fraud. I don't see how open source fits. Let's say you are working on a for-profit software product. If open source was a valid principle, wouldn't that mean that you should always release the product as open source? That for others, even without knowing the details, that your behavior in that regard should be predictable? I could understand if there was context in the form of legal restrictions that made it impossible, but as a principle, does it really work? Just because I disagree with open source as a principle doesn't mean that I disagree with it entirely. There are certainly valid, rational reasons for releasing your work as open source. I view principles as more of an automatic thing -- like honesty; it's just something that's there by default. I don't look at open source that way. My point is that if you rationally consider why you are releasing your work as open source, including foreseeable long-term consequences, and if you do the work using your own time and resources, then it's moral -- and if you don't; if you evade and sacrifice a lower value for a higher one on what amounts to a whim, then it's immoral. I know of several people who lost their jobs at Microsoft as a result of using company resources to develop open source software. I know of several former Unix kernel engineers who contributed a lot of time to Linux development, and whose jobs were eventually phased out due to the availability of open source operating systems. They are still employed as software engineers, but at a much lower wage than before. These consequences were not intentional, yet they were both foreseeable by a rational person. It was not honest mistakes; it was evasion.

How can you tell a polluted project from one that isn't? I mostly agree. However, there is a difference between an honest error and evading an obvious consequence. My point is that IF a developer does not rationally consider the long-term consequences of his choice, and IF he could have rationally foreseen that he would endanger his job, then he is acting immorally. As a separate point, I also claim that this happens much more frequently than is commonly believed -- based on many years of personal experience.

That's reasonable. An inanimate object can't be blamed for being immoral -- so, yes, I'm calling out the immoral actions of some of the people involved with Linux and other open source projects. I'm also saying that I think those immoral actions are much more common than some people seem to believe. So as we come to some understanding and agreement, you call my comments off topic and pointless? Nice.

Except Linus lives in Finland, and isn't subject to US law or US courts. I haven't taken the time to look into this myself. However, last I heard, Linux supported FAT32, and part of FAT32 is Joliet naming. The "so what" is that many users of Linux and other open source software are unknowingly accepting the risk of being liable for patent infringement. The creators of the software know that risk is present, and refuse to disclose it. I view this lack of disclosure to be an immoral action by the creators and distributors. I agree that there are many good reasons to make software free. I never said otherwise. The point I'm trying to make is that free software as a principle is flawed; that there are cases where making software free, or releasing it in open source form, is damaging to the developer. Again, I'm not arguing against free software as such. I'm saying the reasons some developers choose to make their software free or release it as open source are not always rational. They may not release directly competing software, but it can still be competitive in the sense that all software is written by software developers; the products may not compete, but the skillsets do. If you were planning to actively upskill, while using open source to reduce the value of the jobs of your competing coworkers and improve the health of the company you work for, that might be a rational reason to participate in it. Unfortunately, most of the Open Source developers I know don't think that far ahead.

What I'm saying is that IF a person who is participating in open source uses their employer's resources without permission, then they are acting immorally. I am also asserting, based on personal experience, that I believe this is commonplace. I am further asserting that this use of stolen resources morally pollutes the pool of open source software, in the same way that excessive stolen goods might pollute an otherwise valuable flea market. Sorry, apparently my use of a double-negative was confusing. Patent law restricts the use of a patented invention without the explicit agreement of the patent holder, regardless of how the item containing the invention was acquired. Infringement, even if accidental, is subject to financial penalties. I'm not saying that trade secrets are immoral. I'm saying the anti-trust procedures that required AT&T to resort to trade secret law instead of patent law, and which also discouraged them from properly enforcing their trade secret contracts, are immoral. Yes, and when those people act in a way that endangers their job, they are being immoral. Morality is always about individual behavior. If your choices are rational for the long-term, then they are moral. My claim is that many people involved in open source are not thinking about the long term. In which case they would acting immorally. I'm not against Open Source as such. I'm against the irrational behavior of some of the people who are involved in Open Source.

See my previous post. As the page I linked to showed, Google was found liable. There's no legal reason why anyone running Linux 2.4.22.x or later wouldn't also be liable. Yes, that's the one. A "trade secret" is a means of protecting a process or system by not disclosing how it works and requiring customers not disclose the same data. Trade secret status is lost when a non-licensee becomes aware of the protected data by non-criminal means. Trade secrets are not registered with the government. The AT&T Unix licenses required a licensee not to allow "unauthorized use or distribution of the code, methods and concepts contained in or derived from the Unix product." The issue goes back to the 1953 consent decree for AT&T, which came about as a result of anti-trust litigation against them. One of its requirements was that AT&T was not allowed to go into the computer business. It could engage in computer-oriented research, but it could not actively market any inventions it came up with. The Unix trade secret status was taken from them in part because AT&T was lax about enforcing their contracts. Companies usually complied well, but universities violated the terms terribly, and were never taken to task as a result. In fact, one of the early and most egregious violations was the publication of the entire Unix kernel source code in book form was John Lions' "Commentary on Unix 6th Edition" in 1976 -- which was very quickly circulated among non-licensees (I happen to have an early legal copy of one). I believe one of the main reasons AT&T did not try harder to enforce their contracts is because they felt there was a significant risk of running into the anti-trust limitations established by the consent decree. Consider honesty as a moral virtue. We know that telling a lie is bad, because it can hurt you; not just through guilt, but also from the reaction of others. If you don't care or don't think about the consequences of telling a lie, it doesn't mean they aren't there. As an example, imagine that you worked for someone making orange juice. Everyone worked hard, used the best oranges, and made really good juice. The quality product brought in many customers. The juice sold for a good price, and your employer was therefore able to pay you well. Then, on your own time, you decide to make lemonade, and give it away. You make lots of it. The quality might not be as high as what you make at work, but it's pretty good, and you soon develop a large following. However, people start coming into your work and saying "hey, why isn't your juice free like the lemonade guy's?" Next thing you know, your wage is declining as your boss cuts costs. You might even lose your job. The first moral question here is, first: is such a response predictable, similar to the response to a lie being predictable. I believe it is. The next question is whether your job is more important to you in the long term than what you get out of making lemonade. Perhaps you have plans to encourage others to do the same as you, and to make a living selling them lemon-specific equipment. If it is valuable to you, then you're acting morally. But if it isn't, then you aren't. The main irrational actors in this case are the developers. Continuing the example above, how can your employer compete with "free"? One way is to cut costs. They might reduce staff and just make less of the same high-quality product. Or, when they see that the public accepts a lower quality product as long as it costs much less, they might jump on the bandwagon and do they same. Maybe they replace their staff with a bunch of low-paid flunkies, or they buy cheap oranges from overseas, or maybe they even ship the whole business overseas. Whichever direction they choose, odds are that your job, wage and future will be impacted. Once again, the first moral question is are those types of responses predictable by a rational person? I believe they are. Therefore, if you give away a product similar to what you're being paid to create, it has the potential of damaging you, not unlike being dishonest does, so it's immoral. Someone else training your competition isn't immoral. You training your own competition might be, unless it consciously and rationally fits your value hierarchy. You may value training people more than your current job, for whatever reason. That's fine. But to deny that releasing a complex, functional, well-tested application as open source doesn't serve as education, and to deny that some of those you educate might eventually compete with you in some way, is just evasion. A rational person will probably care if they have competition. Wages in the software industry, as in most industries, are proportional, in part, to supply and demand. If there are a large and increasing number of people available who can do the same things you do, then your wages and possibly your job are at risk; specialization and uniqueness have value. I know many software engineers who readily admit how much they've learned from reading open source code. I can't blame them; I've even done it myself. The moral issue is with the original developer. Let's say they've invented some new, unique and cool way to do something. With that skill, they find a good job (many SW jobs used to be much more specific in their skill requirements than they are today). Then they publish an open source app that shows everyone how their new approach works. Lots of other devs read the code and say, "oh, I see, that's cool; I can do that, too!" Now the only thing special about the original dev is that he thought of it first; he may well lose his job.

Another reason I think Linux and the open source community have moral issues is because I know from personal experience that quite a few people who contribute to those projects do so on their employer's time, using their employer's resources, and without their employer's consent. So, using your own time and resources might be moral, as I discussed earlier -- but using your employer's resources is really a form of theft. Using software that was created using immoral means (theft or fraud) is also immoral, in the same way that using stolen property is. Google recently lost a $5M patent infringement suit that was based on something specific in the kernel. See http://www.baudlabs.com/archives/1441 I don't have a list of the other known infringements handy, but they definitely include other things in the kernel. Microsoft has a patent on the FAT filesystem, for example, and for the way it handles long names (Joliet naming). Some might argue the infringed patents are not enforceable or whatever, but that's really an unknown until they are litigated; there is still a potential liability. True. However, it still retains the rich intellectual heritage of Unix, and therefore wouldn't be what it is today without those initial innovations. Equally important, AT&T's work established the initial market for this type of OS, including wide adoption in Universities due to a liberal licensing policy for educational institutions. Without those efforts, while something like Linux may have come along eventually, it wouldn't have had nearly the same level of acceptance.

Even though it's a few years old, I'd like to return to the subject of the original post, regarding the morality of Linux. I believe Linux and the associated distributions are immoral, for two reasons that I didn't see mentioned earlier in this thread: 1. The code is well-documented to have violated many patents. Unfortunately, the patent holders have (so far) been reluctant to enforce their rights, but the violations nonetheless exist. Some patent holders have given their rights away in support of free software, but not all of them have. 2. The code is distributed to people without disclosing to them that by using it, they are subjecting themselves to potential claims for patent infringement -- which is basically a form of fraud. There is at least one version of Linux that resolves part of the first issue and the entire second issue -- the one from Novell -- although I don't recall if it's available for free. In that case, Microsoft agreed with Novell to provide patent indemnity to Novell's Linux customers. However, the patent violations for non-Microsoft patent holders remain. I should add that while I think Linux' use of the original Unix code by itself was probably moral, I do think the government actions which made that possible were immoral. Unix used to be protected by AT&T as a Trade Secret; it was not patented or copyrighted. There would seem to be a moral gray zone of sorts here, since Linux relies on information that was basically extorted from its original inventors. On the subject of free software, speaking as a software developer with 30+ yrs experience, including very early versions of Unix, my two cents here is that many of the professional developers who are giving their work away are not being rationally selfish, and therefore they are acting immorally. In some cases, they are being moral, and those cases, I think it's fine. However, the developers I know who have done this type of thing haven't considered that they are often shooting themselves in the foot in the long term: 1. By giving their work away, they have helped to encourage a culture of "software should be free." If you are making your living writing software, this is almost certainly not a good thing. 2. IMO, free software helped to encourage the idea that anyone could write complex software; that it's more like digging a ditch as opposed to a creative effort like writing a novel or an opera. The result was a willingness to hire buildings full of very junior developers and ship code development offshore, something that has decimated many aspects of the industry, and damaged quality and the public's perception of software ("it always crashes," etc). 3. They are helping to train their competition, by providing extensive, functional examples. Software development is an almost purely intellectual task. I think many people attack it for that reason. It's not the software they wish to destroy as much as it is the minds of the people who create it.

Those are forms of illegal initiation of force. As in any case of initiation of force, the government's role is to protect the rights of everyone involved. If parents are abusing their kids, they are committing a crime, and should be treated as criminals. It's not that the children would be taken away from their parents, it's that the parents would be taken away from their kids and restrained, by force if required. Another interesting question is how do you determine if something is child abuse or not. For example, is spanking child abuse? Clearly, a parent needs to be able to force their kids to do (or not do) certain things, in order to keep them safe as they grow up. So, the rules aren't the same as for the general public. Foster care is fine. Foster parents should voluntarily accept the role and the associated cost.

That's not what I said. The bottom line is this: is it moral for government to point a gun at my head and extort money from me in order to pay for your Alzheimer's nursing care? No. Even if that means you die? Still no. In addition, I may well need that money to cover the costs of my own health issues, or those of my family. When government takes money from me, they may well be denying me the ability to support and care for myself. If I can't control my property and the fruits of my labor, then I can't control my own life. Today, people happily risk that government will be there for them when they are really needed, but the ignore or evade the details -- you know, things like long-term sustainability, the Obamacare death panels and all that. Is that really any better than risking that charity will be there?

Most kids don't have to support themselves, so Productiveness and Independence are virtues that are likely to be more highly developed in adults than kids. Also, I'm not saying that all kids don't have proper morals. Rather, people learn by experience. Everyone has some type of moral code, whether they know it or not. Experience helps us learn what works and what doesn't. A kid might think there's no cost to dishonesty, for example. After they suffer the consequences of lying, they might recognize their error and adjust their moral code accordingly.