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!
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 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.
Honestly, yes, I think it’s one of the best examples of anarchism in action the world has ever seen. And an especially pertinent example to point out to those who’d say things like, “Why would anyone do work or innovate without a profit motive?” Lots of good and innovative software, made without any profit incentive by a collective of people who are working on it just because they want to and they enjoy it.
I spent hours every day either taking pictures of organisms or identifying them online, just for the sake of it and without financial reimbursement. People who say you need a profit motive to do work are just passionless and detached from the world…
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.
Yes, as an anarchist I regularly point to FOSS as a plausible example of it working
Cory Doctorow has a novel “Walkaway” which is basically “what if society but FOSS”. It’s really good!
To answer your question, while it has a lot in common with anarchism I don’t think anyone benefits from trying to fit it into a predefined political box. It’s something new.
It’s a great book, and very relevant.
Wow, I didn’t think, I would get such an interesting book recommendation out of this. Thank you so much!
Cory Doctorow is prolific and has written a ton of other great and highly interesting stuff as well. He’s a very intelligent fellow.
My pleasure! It kind of reminds me of Snow Crash in that it’s really fun and adventurous but also made me think deep thoughts.
I think FOSS enable those kind of communities but I don’t think FOSS as a concept is any of those things. those communities could equally work with a non FOSS license (eg one that prevents commercial use or a license that allow usage only by members of a specific community). They uses existing licenses because they go momentum and have legal precedents that allows people to defend their rights.
Most FOSS licenses were specifically designed to allow profiting from the wok of others, even the GPL. Just see how many billion dollar companies (think Azure, AWS, etc) profit from projects without giving anything back.
Open source is not literally communism, but I do think it’s one of the best examples to demonstrate that anarcho-communism is plausible.
Yes. It is pretty much exactly how we would do software development.
It can definitely be a form of praxis.
Sorry for being a bit of an idiot, but what is praxis?
The textbook definition would be the application of theory to action. It’s basically leftist slang for putting the theories of socialism/communism/humanism into practice in a real way.
Alright, thanks ;)
It’s an observation of Marx, I think correct, that society organises in a manner aligned around the means of production. Agrarian -> feudal, industrial -> capitalist etc. I think the essential distinguishing feature of software vs capital goods is that software can be copied without the loss of the original. Hence I think the concept of ownership fails and the mode of production becomes anarchist.
Only if you use GPL, not MIT.
I think MIT is anarchistic license. You can do whatever the fuck you want with it, but for this shit to work for both of us, you really should collaborate
Further, GPL relies on enforcement from an authority on copyrights, which is exactly the opposite of what anarchists suggest
Yes although what tends to happen is the capitalists just take MIT licenced code and make bank off it.
This is all moot now that LLMs can launder the code anyway.
Yeah we do live in a capitalist world
You obviously want WTFPL instead of MIT for that.
Yeah that’s even better
But I believe in a world where no license would be equal to that
While not explicitly so, FOSS as a concept aligns very closely with far left anti-capitalist principles. The existence of corporate and right-winger-owned FOSS projects is a bit of an oxymoron, but doesn’t discredit the fact that it’s inherently a far left concept.
