Free and Open Source Software

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.

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.

Yes. It is pretty much exactly how we would do software development.

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.

Yes, as an anarchist I regularly point to FOSS as a plausible example of it working

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.

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.

Open source is not literally communism, but I do think it's one of the best examples to demonstrate that anarcho-communism is plausible.

I think it's more of a socialist mindset that is spreading with FOSS, because it focuses it's workings on the common good, Most FOSS projects can be named socialist by nature; they encourage working together to create something bigger, something that doesn't let the small guy fall through the created network. I believe a lot of anarchistic workings are socialist at their core, and FOSS is an embodiment of these workings.

Only if you use GPL, not MIT.

It can definitely be a form of praxis.

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.

Anarcho Communism

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.

I think that communism-capitalism are very inadequate dimensions for discribing the world.

It's a non-market way of doing things, so sure it fits the definition, but labels are dumb, and the people who really like labels are worse.

You'll also notice that you still have to pay for whatever device Linux goes on, which is a strong hint about the economics at play.

No. It strongly depends on the project, they can be organized very differently. You can always fork, but you can also always try to topple dictatorship

Are they programming on a Mac?

I was introduced to communism/socialism through Linux.

A lot of value in capitalism comes from uncompensated work. I don't consider it communism as much as protecting work from exploitation.

There are some people who are in it for what you've listed (flattened hierarchy, worker owned, etc) but there are others who are in it for personal ownership and control, which may align better w/ a libertarian set of values, but you're not wrong about the ancom aspects

Most of the systems that enslave us run on linux.

I used to think so. It's ideologically sound except for allowing corporations the same free use as anyone else. There are plenty of forward thinking people who would never want to support the oppressive evil of massive technology corporations and would never intentionally help them. Then they publish free software and directly help them anyway. It's not a coincidence that most "free" software is funded by the US tech industry who is directly benefited from it. I'm not sure of a way to change it that would help regular people faster than it helps private industry crush regular people.

In Soviet Russia, code programs you!