Comment by ngruhn
9 days ago
Just because it's free? Let's talk again when all open source projects are funded and controlled by the state with zero competition between them and no consumer choice. Only one Linux distro, only one database, only one web framework, etc. And it's decided top-down from the state what to work on. I doubt though that these projects would have started in the first place in a communist setting.
There is no reason such a state would have to set things up this way.
As an example: you probably know that germany has socialized healthcare. It is, however, not implemented as a single-payer model. Instead there are tons of different insurances competing with each other, while having a highly regulated floor of what they MUST offer.
Is the model perfect? Hell no, it has tons of issues - though overall it's pretty solid. My point is just that social policies and "no internal competition ever" does absolutely not have to go hand in hand. There is a massive middle ground.
See: social democracy as a concept and in its current implementation.
> germany has socialized healthcare.
Germany has a dual healthcare system with both public (GKV) and private health insurance (PKV) options. About 10% of residents use private health insurance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Germany
And social democracy forked from the socialist tradition over half a century ago (GGP[1] said socialism/communism). So both you and GP are wrong.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46551378
Problem here being that those terms aren't used as defined in regular discourse. Language changes and casual use differs from academic use.
When on an american-centric board anybody writes about "communism", I assume they refer to anything from marxism to stalinism to socialism to democratic socialism to social democracy up to anything non-hyper-capitalist. Not great, but sadly something to be taken into consideration.
Especially when looked at in context - parent was criticizing the EU initiative by essentially claiming something like that leads to a kind of monoculture like in a planned economy reminiscent of "communism", here probably meaning stalinism, from what I assume is a radical libertarian position. Which tells me the person is likely american, implying a rather ... minimal awareness of the nuance here.
Please, look at the actual comment chain and it should be rather trivial to make out what everybody is talking about. Does your comment really add value here?
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"The" state, with no competition, like there's only one state?
Belgium isn't big enough to realistically have its own linux, but France and Germany are.
Of course it's big enough. Why would it not be big enough??
All the usual reasons for comparative advantage, plus have you seen the size of OS codebases these days?
North Korea has its own Linux. Google has its own Linux. There are Linux distributions maintained by a single person. Belgium will do fine.
Maintained, with heavy leaning on other people having actually written all the stuff, enabled by an open market.
The hypothetical specifically precludes that.
Yours and others knee jerk reaction proves my point you are conflating autocracy with communism/socialism.
This is as usual confused. People keep discussing communism as if they were (via analogy) talking about capitalism being about men in suites with fake smiles, green paper, bank vaults, and powerpoint presentations. Every time people have to respond with paragraphs upon paragraphs just unrolling all that nonsense.
Try to update your knowledge on the subject instead of talking like an alien in Trafalgar Square.