Rant: Using open source to justify piracy

This last weekend, Slashdot had yet another idiotic since open source software exists, it's OK to be a pirate thread.

This type of freetard thinking annoys me greatly. The thinking amounts to this:

• Artists, movie makers, musicians, and other generators of intellectual property have an inherit desire to generate these things
• These people don't care if they are paid or not
• Therefore, all media should be free and there should be no intellectual property

This completely ignores the obvious truth that artists, movie producers, musicians, software developers, and other creators of intellectual property, do indeed care whether or not they get paid.

Freetards with this thinking look at the free software movement to justify this asinine thinking. More annoyingly, many of these freetards think they can have the same customer-provider relationship with a free software developer that they have with a piece of commercial software paid for.

People with this thinking generally do not understand the collaborative nature of open source development. They think, in so many words "I want you to work hard making this and am unwilling to pay your nor to lift one finger helping you". They do not understand that, if they want better documentation for a program, they can write it themselves. If they want better artwork for an open-source video game, they can draw it themselves. If they want to see a feature implemented, they can implement it themselves.

They think they can just demand that the developer/artists/whoever do this work for them "for fun and for free".

This is the thinking of a small extremist minority; the internet allows all sorts of wild and fringe theories to be propagated and supported in online bulletin boards.