This thought came to me in the shower today. Open source checks most of the boxes. It is a collaborative, worker owned (develloper-owned) project, that tries to flatten hierarchy. Especially if you look at something like Debian ), which really tries to have a bottom-up structure.
Of course, there are exceptions, considering there are a lot of corporate open-source projects, that are not democratically maintained and clearly only serve the interest of the company, who created it (like chromium for example).
So I am mainly talking about community-oriented FOSS projects here.
And if you were to agree with my statement, would you say that developing FOSS software is advancing the goals of the anarchist / communist project, because it is laying the groundwork infrastructure needed for a new kind of economy and society?
Thought this could be an interesting discussion!
No there are clear rules
BoringCactus wrote a tentative post-mortem to “open source”/free software (five-and-a-half years ago already?!) that I find/found interesting and somewhat relevant to your question.
That was indeed a really interesting read! It really made me think more deeply about software licencing. I didn’t quite understand what the authors problem with GPLv3 was though? That the companies are scared of it? Isn’t that kind of a good thing? I don’t want amazon to make massive profits off of my work, because if that’s possible to do, then that would necessarily mean, that my goal as a developer (to protect my work from exploitation while helping the common good) isn’t working. I am curious what you have taken away from the essay though? How do you protect your code from corporate exploitation?
The author of that piece would say you protect your code by not open sourcing it (or by using a license that grants no rights to use said source). It’s an incredibly frustrating piece to me, because it presents hampering corporations as more important than not screwing over individual FOSS users.
The reason they blame GPLv3 is because they claim the open sourcing requirements within it are so onerous that corporations just avoid it, making it so that rather than corporations contributing to that software, they often end up supplanting it with their own versions that have alternate licensing, which then not only denies the original author any benefit, but even makes the corporation ‘look good’ to people who don’t realize or care what happened.
It’s so frustrating to me because they’re doing this whole “pragmatism over idealism” claim, while also not acknowledging that FOSS as a movement is the only reason any corporation open sources anything now. They certainly didn’t used to. But the author seemingly would rather people not have any tools made with or by companies, who are benefiting from them financially, than have both corporations and individual users benefit from them. That’s ideology over pragmatism as well.
Capitalism is bad, but it’s bad because it entrenches profit over morality, via the mistaken belief/ false premise that competing interests will average out in the end. It’s not bad because every single output it creates is somehow evil incarnate, which seems to be the author’s gist.
Yep, and that’s why I use it.
Fuck yea! I’m not those dumb tear down the government people, I’m the make it redundant pragmatic people. I will go as close to my ideal state as possible.
I’m going with communalism. And its even simpler. A group of like minded people wanting to be creative nd share creativity without monetization. Seems more akin to artist movements to me. And I’m all for it.
I often think of community run open source free license software projects as an example of communalism, personally. Maybe when I learn about more forms of anarchism and socialism there will be other ideas that feel more apt to describe it
I consider FOSS a step toward prefiguring an anarchy.
Current source control management systems however perpetuate heirarchies with roles such as maintainer and developer with different permissions. I like to keep the permissions similar for roles. I might take away foot guns like force push from developers.
Another problem limiting anarchy is consensus. Getting agreement from everyone effected is still not quite there in the merge request process.
But you can fork it and make your own thing. Standard hierarchy has much more power over resources. Git’s hierarchy is almost simbolic.
Not Communism in a political sense. More like community based, friendly software.
Open Source as in transparent or non proprietary.
Not really.
I compare it more to fan fiction and amateur writing. Some is a great read, much better than the garbage you might find on NYT’s best seller list. Very talented people doing what they love and trying to be of service to others along the way. FOSS often seems more of a passion project for the creator(s) than an anarchist/communist project, IMHO - although there are obvious parallels.
I’m definitively printing this and putting it on my wall
I do not.
FOSS is the natural conclusion of public code having a negligible cost to supply once it has been produced. Ideally it takes IP out of the equation and allocates compensation towards development rather than rent extraction.
FOSS is a question of centralization & authority vs decentralization & freedom.
It’s what happens when copyright gets extended to infinity with no useful public domain to speak of. And then they will force you to rent the shit out of the copyright with a monthly subscription.
Linux runs on billions of devices. Every device with a microprocessor, except for the tiny portion of desktops, would be useless hunks of garbage without Linux. And Linux would not have those numbers if it wasn’t FOSS. The internet would be a shell of its current self without FOSS and Linux.
The world needs FOSS, and quite frankly, it’s a direct counterbalance to the invasive force of capitalism. Anybody who think the GPL isn’t political clearly hasn’t read anything its creators wrote.
I had the same exact thought after Steve balmer called it communist cancer, but then I came to a conclusion. Open source, and fair source software is communist, but free software is not. Free is as freedom and not price. You can make money off of it, but why is it different than OSS. The difference is that Free software protects the user’s rights as opposed to OSS. Protecting the user’s rights and freedoms is important.
Yes. It is pretty much exactly how we would do software development.
In Soviet Russia, code programs you!
I think that communism-capitalism are very inadequate dimensions for discribing the world.
