JemmyDo you consider the free software movement to be an anarchist/communist project?
DeckPacker
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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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…
You might even say they’re feeling alienated, as a certain German economist might say.
Meanwhile we have many capitalist groups stifling innovation in the name of profit. It’s more profitable for them to prevent competition than to compete for the best product.
Yes, as an anarchist I regularly point to FOSS as a plausible example of it working
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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 ;)
Open source is not literally communism, but I do think it’s one of the best examples to demonstrate that anarcho-communism is plausible.
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
Yes. Not going to happen. The next best thing would be to shorten copyright protection to 10 years. (Also not going to happen, but easier to convince people that we should try this.)
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.
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.
Anarcho Communism
Well who lives in that castle over there?
No one lives there.
On second thought, lets not go to Camelot, ’tis a silly place
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.
Wow, I didn’t think, I would get such an interesting book recommendation out of this. Thank you so much!
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.
Cory Doctorow is prolific and has written a ton of other great and highly interesting stuff as well. He’s a very intelligent fellow.
It’s a great book, and very relevant.
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.
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.
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 was introduced to communism/socialism through Linux.
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 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
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.
Not Communism in a political sense. More like community based, friendly software.
Open Source as in transparent or non proprietary.
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.
Yeah I agree about the labels. The worst part of communism is the people who like communism. I am a simple man, I just want to be technically a communist without liking it or even being remotely interested in it, thankyouverymuch. Open source is great for that.
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
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.
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.
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.
A lot of value in capitalism comes from uncompensated work. I don’t consider it communism as much as protecting work from exploitation.
Isn’t protecting workers from exploration on of the core goals of communism?
maybe but its not the sum totality of it. So I assume communists would like the gpl but view it as unnecessary. I mean judging from what I have heard and read for stallman. I think he would like the gpl to be unnecessary. That all knowledge be free. Its ip law that requires it because of monotenazation of it. So it uses ip law against itself.
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.
Are they programming on a Mac?
I think that communism-capitalism are very inadequate dimensions for discribing the world.
I’m definitively printing this and putting it on my wall
Yes. It is pretty much exactly how we would do software development.
tl;dr : No, FOSS project are used by military and fascists
long: It’s link to a common misunderstanding of “mean of production”. FOSS developers do not own the mean of production. Mean of production is not just the tool to produce goods and services, but all the industry needed to make them available : promotion, distribution, … Socialization (for anarchists) or collectivization (for comies) of industries mean that workers own and manage (or self-organized) every establishment needed for this and organize together to get their power back. In this case, we could abolish some industries, change them, or choose where to send the production or not. This is the same for cooperatives and self-managed places; it’s may be some interesting experience or complementary with class struggle, but is not a revolutionary move in itself
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
Most of the systems that enslave us run on linux.
- galadriel or something
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.
If we take the words of Saint Richard Stallman as true in the sense that in his day all software developmet was ’open’ but at some point some decided for whatever reason to start “closing” stuff then one could say all software development did not have any anarchist or communist intention in the beginning, it just turned profit-driven in the way.
I mean, it’s less about the intention and more about the reality of software development. Just because the developers back then didn’t chose to do software development in an anarchist way (although I think a lot of them had that kind of mindset), doesn’t mean, that they didn’t do it using anarchist principles.
In Soviet Russia, code programs you!
No. I’m staunchly anti-communist and also a staunch supporter of free software. It’s also possible to have another combination of beliefs on these things, but these are mine.
I suggest reading the section “Why Don’t You Move to Russia?” of this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.en.html
I agree with that. Free software is about building a society more strongly based on individual rights. At least Marxism-Leninism certainly isn’t about that, though anarchism can be argued to be to some extent.
I suggest you read some Marxist literature. Marxism has become a bad word in the West because it undermines exploitation under capitalism. But everything Marx and Lenin espoused was based on improving the rights of individuals (you could make a convincing argument that the structure of the Soviet Union was incapable of accomplishing that goal, but that it got closer than anything American capitalism has been able to).
My personal rec is State and Revolution by Lenin. It’s short and easy to read.
While I agree, that Marxism-Leninism or Russian-Style “communism” have nothing to do with free software, I would also not call them real communism. Marx litteraly defined communism as a classless, stateless society. There is no such thing as a communist state. I also would argue, that free software is fundamentally anti-capitalist, because it rejects the basis of capitalism, which is private ownership of the means of production (which in this case would be software). So, in my opinion you cannot simultaneously believe that capitalism is the best way to organize software development while believing that free software is the best way to organize software development.
No, it doesn’t. Companies developing software for internal use, including as part of a “means of production” (e.g. robot firmware at a factory), and keeping it secret from the public is completely compatible with free software. It’s only when software is distributed to other people/entities that the free software movement insists that the recipient should also have freedom (including to run a business with it or any modified version of it).
Are you shure about that? Because that would mean, that every piece of software, that hasn’t been released to the public would automatically be free software, which would make the label pretty meaninglessness.
Yes. There are several sections on gnu.org that talk about this, these are the ones I was able to quickly find.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html
No, every piece of software, that hasn’t been released to the public, does not need a license. So there is no need to talk about free software, because that is a decision you make (sometimes made for you if you modify a GPL piece of software) when you release to the public.
Agreed. I am a hard GNU fan.
Only problem with communism is that humans are unable to practice it without turning to fascistic practices. As an idea it is beautiful. “To each according to their needs.”
Free software works though?? Also if you want some real world examples of anarchist-like principles being applied in praxis, without fascism, look up Rojava or the Zapatista-Movement.
Are the developers needs met really though?
In some cases yes, in others no. I mean it would satisfy some needs of creativity, community and obviously specific software needs. Sometimes, people can also earn money from donations. But, mostly there’s not enough monetary gain to satisfy the needs of food and housing.
No there are clear rules
Anarchism doesn’t mean, there are no rules. Read the wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism