this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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Free and Open Source Software

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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!

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[–] rimu@piefed.social 15 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Only if you use GPL, not MIT.

[–] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (2 children)

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

[–] rimu@piefed.social 10 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 10 hours ago

Yeah we do live in a capitalist world

[–] matsdis@piefed.social 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

You obviously want WTFPL instead of MIT for that.

[–] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Yeah that's even better

But I believe in a world where no license would be equal to that