Don't read Atlas Shrugged. Its cool as a story but sadly its jam packed with Manifesto. Its like HPMOR but even more obnoxious.

The 'manifesto' is why I recommended it :cool:

Ayn Rand was a very vocal proponent of capitalism, and the book is very relevant to the question of FOSS software development.

It's like the bible; it's only when you actually read that you can recognise how truly awful it is.

Eh...

Ayn Rand was a fucking moron. Her understanding of society and economics rivals that of a particularly slow toddler.

You could easily say the same thing about Richard M. Stallman, but many people in the FOSS community seem to dig what he says.

Ayn Rand was a fucking moron. Her understanding of society and economics rivals that of a particularly slow toddler.

You could easily say the same thing about Richard M. Stallman, but many people in the FOSS community seem to dig what he says.

Yeah, you haven't done enough research on Rand if you compare them.

I'll admit, RMS is probably a bit further "out there" than Rand is.

Both of them espouse(d) ideals that don't really work well in the real world. Both of them oppose(d) a contrary ideal they saw as a growing threat to freedom. One of them peels things off his foot to eat on stage when he gets hungry. Of the two, I think Rand's ideal is worth striving for much more than RMS's. Especially as a game designer, btw: MMO economies tend to be VERY Randian.

People who create things should be fairly compensated for them. I've known more than a few people I believe are legitimately worth more than a million dollars a year (I've also met people earning that much who... well let's just say were worth somewhat less, IMHO).

Part of the problem for RMS may be due to him locking himself away in an ivory tower of academia never using "non-free" software, which means he has no idea what most of the software written these days does, who it is written for, or how it works. Rand's problem was similar, though from a different cause, seeing the extremes growing in the Warsaw Pact nations and what they were doing to the people there.

Even Alan Greenspan [whether you agreed with his particular brand of economics or not, _no one_ understood the American economy the way he did] erred on the side of "humanity" believing that corporations would hold themselves to at least some standard of ethics - this oversight contributed (not caused) to one of the latest banking/wall street bailouts (there have been so many I've lost track).

Sometimes you need to see, study, and understand the extremes so you can find the right balance in the middle.

Much of life follows that pattern.