I have some newfound respect for the man, it seems. Not that I didn’t respect him earlier, just thought that his toxicity was the defining trait of his temper. I find these takes somehow mellow the image in my mind.
What’s the real difference between an “anarchist communist” and a “communist”? The first one can have “personal property” while the second cant? So… an anarchist communist can own a car but not a house? According to the internet “personal property” is everything that can be moved (not real estate) and isn’t considered for production of something…
Anarchism is fundamentally a firm rejection of unjust hierarchy, including the state, via building up of bottom-up structures using networks of Mutual Aid or other strategies (like Syndicalism).
Communism is fundamentally about advancing beyond Capitalism into Socialism and eventually Communism. It’s fundamentally Marxist, unlike most forms of Anarchism (which don’t necessarily reject Marx, but also don’t accept everything Marx wrote). Communists are generally perfectly fine with using the state in order to eventually achieve a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society, as each becomes unnecessary and whithers away.
In essence, Anarchism rejects that a state is necessary at all, and seeks to directly replace current systems with the end-goal of an Anarchist structure, whereas Communists tend to agree more with gradual change, rapidly building up the productive forces, and achieving a global, international Communism.
Anarcho-Communism seeks to combine these into directly implementing full Communism without going through Socialism first.
All of this is from a generally Leftist perspective, without leaning into any given tendency, as I believe the most critical battles now are building up a sizable leftist coalition. Everyone should focus on organizing, unionizing, reading, learning, sympathizing, empathizing, and improving themselves and those around them.
A big part of the confusion comes from the fact that different people will use these terms differently.
In a capitalist framework, there’s private property and public property. Either an individual (or or specific group) own something, anything, or it’s owned by the government.
In a socialist framework, private property is distinguished from personal property. Personal property is your stuff that you use for yourself. Your coat, your car, your TV, etc. Private property is the means of production, or capital—things that increase a worker’s ability to do useful work. Think factories or companies, where ownership in and of itself, regardless of labor, would make the owner money. Socialists think that kind of private property shouldn’t exist, because it means wealthy people can just own stuff for a living, profiting off of the people who do the work.
Housing can go either way. Owning a home for yourself and your family would be far closer to personal property, while owning an apartment building to collect rent would be far closer to private property.
Socialism, for the most part and historically, is an umbrella term describing social rather than private ownership. That would include anarchism, which largely synonymous with “libertarian socialism.” Lenin, on the other hand, used it to more specifically refer to an intermediate stage between capitalism in communism, so you might see people using that more narrow definition to exclude anarchists, democratic socialists, etc.
I’ve never heard anyone argue against personal property. Usually the difference is that Anarchists want to skip the workers’ state, while other Communists think it’s a necessity to achieve Communism.
The idea of free software is extremely socialist/communist. People working together to create something that anyone can use for free, with profit being a non-existent or at least minor motivator.
It’s a real shame that generally lefties don’t really care about or ‘get’ software freedom. You should be pushing for free software on all levels. In your personal life and in government. It’s crazy how much power a company like Apple, Microsoft or Google has over everyone.
It’s mutual. I don’t necessarily extend my expectations of a machine doing what I tell it to, out into geopolitics.
There’s a lot of overlap in useful terminology and philosophy. There’s a bit of overlap in organizational problem-solving (and problem-having). But you can be aggressively capitalist, and still recognize the benefits of stone-soup development. Even in hardware - RISC-V is going to undercut low-end ARM in embedded applications, and hard-drive manufacturers are not exactly Spanish republicans.
It’s pretty hard to fight hegemony when your salary is just built on donations. A lot of important tech is also paid for via government grants then the private sector gets to use it and erect the walled gardens when it should be in the commons.
I was leftie before I was techie. If you don’t know anything around tech and computers you wouldn’t know what to do. Even as a fairly tech-adjacent professional it took me quite a while.
Then again, I only became a real leftie again after kicking all the corpos out of my computer.
Tech used to be (and still is) obscured by heavy gatekeeping. We who understand a little more like to joke about those who don’t, and I guess we’ll have to stop that if we really want to unite the left. Don’t ridicule, explain. The person might never have had a chance to learn the concept.
There’s definitely a gatekeeping issue, but free software doesn’t automatically mean ‘force people to use Linux’, there’s stuff like Firefox, Libreoffice, Nextcloud, etc.
It’s things like councils working together on common software platforms instead of going with commercial vendors, supported by local companies instead of shoveling billions to Google and Microsoft that gets sent overseas immediately. It’s federal governments hiring developers directly to work on software instead of using commercial vendors.
You’re missing the entire point of the free software movement. Free as in freedom does NOT intrinsically mean free as in absence of cost. Linux exists because of companies like Cygnus who successfully marketed the Bazaar, as opposed to the Cathedral, to investors.
Stallman and Torvalds themselves have gone on record multiple times stating the utter lack of political motivation in being able to modify the software on your machine.
TIL: I must be a communist/socialist/leftist/whatever for supporting FOSS. What’s next? Marxism/Leninism? Or maybe I missed that stop, while riding the communism train. Then again, I’m already on Lemmy, so I must be into ML as well, right?
No one is labeling you. Though you should perhaps reflect on the world around you and maybe see that adhering to an ideology is actually just applying philosophy comprehensively to all layers of society at the same time.
Well, there is also a more right leaning take. You take care of your self and scratch your own itch, and you should not be a liability to the society, but make your self useful and contribute back. And I think this is kind of the reason FLOSS works well, it can be aligned with many philosophies.
You didn’t write the kernel, write the libraries, or write the user space applications, did you? No, Linux is the product of a collaborative group of strangers working towards the same goal, a goal that largely doesn’t include any considerations for profit. You haven’t pulled yourself up by your boot straps to make Linux. Hell, even Linus didn’t do that. It’s the product of thousands of people working on it over decades. It’s not capitalist, it’s not individualistic, Linux is communal.
Eric S Raymond (ESR) is the originator of the philosophy you’re espousing. He’s a Right-Libertarian who has made a lot of contributions to and arguments about FOSS, but in this case i think he’s pretty much wrong. He was a big proponent of the BSD license and opponent of the GPL because, in his view, the GPL interfered with economic activity while BSD was more compatible with it.
ESR’s belief was that open source software was not threatened by capitalism and that it would thrive even if large companies used it, while the other side of the argument was that it would languish if all of the large users were corporations who did not (voluntarily) contribute back. In contrast, with GPL (and similar mandatory open licenses): the corporations would be required to contribute back and thus whether the usage was corporate or not the project would benefit and grow either way.
That was a while ago, though. I think we can see, now, that while the BSDs are great (and have many of their own technological advantages over Linux based OSes) and they are being used by corporations, that has not resulted in the kind of explosive growth we’ve seen with GPL software. Gross tech bros love to use both BSD-style and GPL-style code, but with GPL they’re required to contribute back. That attracts developers, too, who don’t want to see their work end up as the foundation of some new Apple product with nothing else to show for it.
So we now can pretty much call it, i think, barring new developments: the Communist (and Left-Libertarian and Anarchist) approach “won” and the Right-Libertarian approach didn’t actually pan out. GPLed software is running servers and all kinds of things even though, technically speaking, BSD was probably a better choice up until recently (until modern containerization, probably) and still has a lot going for it. The Right-Libertarian philosophy on this is a dead end.
The idea of free software isn’t political; ie socialist/communist. Free software is also compatible with free market capitalism. In a capitalist market free of coercion there is nothing that stops one from copying something then changing and/or selling it.
If you make a microwave and I buy one and reverse engineer it then I could produce and sell it just fine. Similarly, if you created a program called Adobe Photoshop, and I got a hold of the code, then I could copy and resell it. Neither capitalism nor the free market has a concept of patents or copyrights which are a political thing. Everything is free to reproduce.
Making the software free is just the logical economic price of a product with a marginal cost very close to zero. Give it away and let everyone build on top of it to make increasingly better things because that is the most efficient way to manage those resources. It’s like the progression of science. We give credit for discovery, but encourage all science to happen in the open so others can take the ideas and build on them without being encumbered.
I hope you don’t think that science is socialist/communist.
Note: After going through the trouble of writing this I became concerned that my use of the loaded term “free market capitalism” could be misunderstood so I’ve decided to define my terms. Free market capitalism isn’t a form of government. Capitalism just means stuff can be privately owned. A market is how capital is coordinated. The free refers to the market transactions being voluntary/free of coercion. So free market capitalism is the “voluntary coordination of private capital”. That definition can exist under varying forms of government which is why I argue that it isn’t a political system in itself.
Capitalism just means stuff can be >privately owned
This is the antithesis of free software. FOSS can not be owned. Patents and copyright are essential to capitalism. You are not allowed to copy and redistribute Adobe Photoshop, nor the music of your favorite band, movies, books, etc etc
This isn’t really correct. Free Open Source Software is very much owned. It is just that the owner doesn’t charge for it, has stated that there are rules for use and modification of the software. FOSS was a clever trick that used copyright against itself. It is was a really brilliant trick, but that trick was only necessary because copyrights exist in the first place. If copyrights didn’t exist then it wouldn’t be illegal to redistribute Adobe Photoshop.
You may argue that copyrights are necessary for the betterment of society, but that is debatable. The biggest case against copyright being necessary is, in fact, the FOSS movement. It proves we don’t actually need companies like Adobe to make all our stuff and charge a lot for it.
Free software subverts some of the rent seeking barriers put in place by capitalists (copyright and patents, both are enforced by government). I agree that a real free market wouldn’t have those things, but capitalists don’t want a free market, they want to capture the market and extract as much profit out of it for the least amount of effort.
My problem with what you said is that it isn’t just capitalists that use patents and copyrights. Russia and China have patents and copyrights. It isn’t limited to capitalists, and saying so confuses people on what the actual issues are.
Russia hasn’t been communist since 1991. Not sure what the copyright regime was in the old Soviet Union. As for China, they’ve implemented a bunch of capitalist concepts in order to interface with the wider capitalist world (as part of trade agreements, they decided to honour copyright and patents in order to be able to sell us stuff).
Just because a nominally communist country (and you can definitely argue about that in China’s case) does something, that doesn’t mean that that thing is automatically either communist or capitalist.
Idk, technically voluntary association is a key tenet of volunteerism/anarcho-capitalism, so if we’re just using volunteering as the basis we might as well say it’s volunteerism. I think anarcho-communism and anarcho-capitalism are a bit more nuanced than “sharing.”
Those advocating for it also use it to display their total lack of perspective and analysis of the mechanics of capitalism. I.e. one can use it as a sign on one’s head saying “not at home for the moment, try again later”.
Anarcho-Capitalism isn’t a thing, it’s just Libertarian Capitalists LARPing with Leftist aesthetics. The very rejection of individual ownership rejects Capitalism, it’s like saying Worker Co-operatives are an example of Capitalism because markets tend to not care what makes them up.
Just because FOSS would be “allowed” in Capitalism doesn’t mean it’s an example of Capitalist principles.
Yes and they’d argue that anarchism isn’t exclusively leftist (well, I’D argue that depends on one’s definition of left/right, because depending on who you ask it’s either good/bad, collectivism/individualism, or lib/auth, and by the latter definition they would then be leftist capitalists, which is funny to think about.) They support individual ownership without rulers, however they still promote sharing of things you own with your community if you can/want.
Right, and just because sharing is “allowed” in communism doesn’t mean sharing is communism. It being allowed in both not being necessarily representative of either is my whole point.
Regardless of what AnCaps argue, the fundamental fact is that Anarchy is a rejection of hierarchy, whereas Private Property itself requires both the Owner/Worker hierarchy, and a monopoly on violence that cannot be reasonably contested to uphold Private Property protections. As such, it can only be considered Libertarian, as it both maintains hierarchy and maintains some semblance of at minimum a nightwatchman state.
As for Left/Right, the standard definition is Collective/Individual ownership of the Means of Production, not necessarily collectivism/individualism or lib/auth. Individual ownership by definition is supporting rulers, the larger Capitalists are effectively no different from a Feudal state.
Sharing being allowed does not mean FOSS aligns with AnCap principles, that’s like saying bagel consumption is AnCap.
FOSS isn’t simply “sharing” either, it’s quite literally a rejection of Individual ownership and creating IP for the collective to use, fork, maintain, and distribute as they see fit. It isn’t a coincidence that FOSS enthusiasts overwhelmingly lean left, just like Lemmy tends to.
Regardless of what AnCaps argue, the fundamental fact is that Anarchy is a rejection of hierarchy, whereas Private Property itself requires both the Owner/Worker hierarchy, and a monopoly on violence that cannot be reasonably contested to uphold Private Property protections. As such, it can only be considered Libertarian, as it both maintains hierarchy and maintains some semblance of at minimum a nightwatchman state.
Regardless is right, because my comments were never about espousing the benefits of anarcho-capitalism, I was using them to make the point that simply because things share a similarity with a political ideology it does not in fact make them “that ideology.” Arguing about ancapistan in this instance is a “strawman.”
Sharing being allowed does not mean FOSS aligns with AnCap principles, that’s like saying bagel consumption is AnCap.
No this is my point, you get your own.
use, fork, maintain, and distribute as they see fit.
Your argument is that because FOSS would be permissible in AnCap society, FOSS being fundamentally constructed upon AnCom principles of rejecting Capitalism and centralization in favor of decentralized and collectively owned and distributed property makes it not in line with Anarcho-Communism.
When the article is giving an example of how Anarcho-Communism would work, Linux is a fantastic example. Nobody is saying Linux is Anarcho-Communism, or that Linux cannot exist within broader contexts, but that in an Anarcho-Communist society, the structure of Linux and FOSS would be the common structure.
Your argument is that because FOSS would be permissible in AnCap society…
Because voluntary association and sharing is also a core tenet of volunteerism/anarchocapitalism, as they also are of anarcho-communism…
FOSS being fundamentally constructed upon AnCom principles of rejecting Capitalism and centralization in favor of decentralized and collectively owned and distributed property
FOSS being similar to AnCom because both share principles of sharing
makes it not in line with Anarcho-Communism.
makes it notnecessarily Anarcho-Communist.
You’re making false equivalencies for the sake of it.
“This rejection of profit and ownership made by a self-admitted leftist is actually completely in line with for-profit individual ownership just because AnCaps don’t murder people for doing charity”
You’re just trying to be contrarion for the sake of it, lmao. Again, the article was showcasing examples of gift economies and how Anarcho-Communism would function, and Linux fits that definition. It wasn’t arguing that Linux is Anarcho-Communism itself. It is not an example of how Anarcho-Capitalism would function, as Anarcho-Capitalism is Capitalism, and FOSS is decidedly anticapitalist, even if said Capitalists wouldn’t murder Linus for rejecting Capitalism.
You’re again being needlessly contrarion, Anarcho-Capitalists don’t advocate for setting up networks of mutual aid and FOSS software, they don’t care about gift economies either. Using Linux as an example for AnCapistan would get you laughed out of the room, if calling yourself an AnCap didn’t already result in that.
Free software doesn’t have owners. If someone else did a better job of being the “benevolent dictator” of a fork of Linux, everyone would start using that fork. Arguably this is a more free-market system than non-free software.
Linus’ power doesn’t come from Ownership, but respect. Anyone can fork it and do what they want, but because Linus is respected, everyone else follows suit.
Anarchism would function in a similar manner, it wouldn’t be a bunch of opinionated people doing whatever they want, but people generally listening to experts who don’t actually hold systemic power.
I meant that as a reply to the second paragraph which generalised anarchism; including the non-Linux world.
I also disagree that this isn’t an issue in the broader Linux community however. See for example the loud minority with an irrational hate against quite obviously good software projects like systemd who got those ideas from charlatans or “experts”.
I know, I used Linux as an example. Just like not everyone needs to be a weatherman to trust weatherman that can recognize experts among themselves, so too can engineers recognize experts among themselves, and so forth.
Yep. This is why the voice of the people should generally speaking be ignored. This is also why 90% of people should be ignored when deciding economic policies.
I would disagree and say it’s more akin to a philosopher king hence less anarchy and more monarchy. It’s all good until the king dies and let’s see who succeeds them.
You can fork it, sure Linus is very respected and his decisions are considered very important but you can fork it and change however you want so it’s still compatible with Anarchism.
I made a commentary about it here https://lemmy.ml/post/511377 in the FLOSS vs Closed Source Philosophy section:
The soul and spirit of FLOSS is socialist/communist, in a similar way to piracy. The purpose of it is to serve the greater good. In comparison, the soul and spirit of closed source software, outside rare cases of benevolence, is highly corporate and fascistic, similar to a leech, which in many cases these days may suck money out of your wallets for subscriptions. It may also serve as a leech to suck your data for telemetry and spying purposes.
Well you solved that conundrum rightly. Now let’s go linch those dirty Apple and John Deere engineers. Since they’ve designed those machines, they must be the only responsible parties for designing them with their extreme anti-consumer and anti-repair policies. They must get commissions on every licensed repair or something, it’s definitely got nothing to do with capitalists putting restrictions on the design team in order to increase profits, nope…
You’re completely off on what I’m getting at. The idea of “Capitalist” hardware, as though the Capitalist did the labor, is wrong. Engineers are paid for their labor power, they don’t typically get royalties or anything of the sort, just like any other laborer.
Someone saying that FOSS software relies on Capitalist hardware is putting the Capitalist over the Engineer, as though the Capitalist created the hardware, and not the labor of the miners, assemblers, designers, engineers, and so forth, regardless of who owns the Capital the labor is done by the Workers. FOSS is agnostic to whoever owned the Means of Proruction of the hardware using or producing it.
And the FOSS system seems to be collapsing right now for the same reason that anarcho-communism only works short-term until someone sees commercial value in it and abuses the system to the limit.
Big corporations initially providing exceptional services based on FOSS and after a while use their market share to excert undue control about the system (see e.g. RedHat, Ubuntu, Chrome, Android, …)
Big corporations taking FLOSS, rebranding it and hiding it below their frontend, so that nobody can interact with or directly use the FLOSS part (e.g. iOS, any car manufacturer, …)
Big and small companies just using GPL (or similar) software and not sharing their modifications when asked (e.g. basically any embedded systems, many Android manufacturers, RedHat, …)
Big corporations using infrastructure FOSS without giving anything back (e.g. OpenSSL, which before Heartbleed was developed and maintained by a single guy with barely enough funding to stay alive, while it was used by millions of projects with a combined user base of billions of users)
The old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook is everywhere.
And so it’s no surprise that many well-known FOSS developers are advocating for some kind of post-FOSS system that forces commercial users to pay for their usage of the software.
Considering how borderline impossible it is for some software developer to successfully sue a company to comply with GPL, I can’t really see such a post-FOSS system work well.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !linux@lemmy.ml
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word “Linux” in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
Also, Linus is a “woke communist”
https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWSXomDbvdxKgOxVAm
I have some newfound respect for the man, it seems. Not that I didn’t respect him earlier, just thought that his toxicity was the defining trait of his temper. I find these takes somehow mellow the image in my mind.
What platform is that? I’ve never seen a mastodon type platform with remote follow
Akkoma, which is a fork of Pleroma. Twitter-like Fediverse has 3 major software pieces: Mastodon, Pleroma (and forks) and Misskey (and forks)
What’s the real difference between an “anarchist communist” and a “communist”? The first one can have “personal property” while the second cant? So… an anarchist communist can own a car but not a house? According to the internet “personal property” is everything that can be moved (not real estate) and isn’t considered for production of something…
A few things draw significant differences.
Anarchism is fundamentally a firm rejection of unjust hierarchy, including the state, via building up of bottom-up structures using networks of Mutual Aid or other strategies (like Syndicalism).
Communism is fundamentally about advancing beyond Capitalism into Socialism and eventually Communism. It’s fundamentally Marxist, unlike most forms of Anarchism (which don’t necessarily reject Marx, but also don’t accept everything Marx wrote). Communists are generally perfectly fine with using the state in order to eventually achieve a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society, as each becomes unnecessary and whithers away.
In essence, Anarchism rejects that a state is necessary at all, and seeks to directly replace current systems with the end-goal of an Anarchist structure, whereas Communists tend to agree more with gradual change, rapidly building up the productive forces, and achieving a global, international Communism.
Anarcho-Communism seeks to combine these into directly implementing full Communism without going through Socialism first.
All of this is from a generally Leftist perspective, without leaning into any given tendency, as I believe the most critical battles now are building up a sizable leftist coalition. Everyone should focus on organizing, unionizing, reading, learning, sympathizing, empathizing, and improving themselves and those around them.
A big part of the confusion comes from the fact that different people will use these terms differently.
In a capitalist framework, there’s private property and public property. Either an individual (or or specific group) own something, anything, or it’s owned by the government.
In a socialist framework, private property is distinguished from personal property. Personal property is your stuff that you use for yourself. Your coat, your car, your TV, etc. Private property is the means of production, or capital—things that increase a worker’s ability to do useful work. Think factories or companies, where ownership in and of itself, regardless of labor, would make the owner money. Socialists think that kind of private property shouldn’t exist, because it means wealthy people can just own stuff for a living, profiting off of the people who do the work.
Housing can go either way. Owning a home for yourself and your family would be far closer to personal property, while owning an apartment building to collect rent would be far closer to private property.
Socialism, for the most part and historically, is an umbrella term describing social rather than private ownership. That would include anarchism, which largely synonymous with “libertarian socialism.” Lenin, on the other hand, used it to more specifically refer to an intermediate stage between capitalism in communism, so you might see people using that more narrow definition to exclude anarchists, democratic socialists, etc.
I’ve never heard anyone argue against personal property. Usually the difference is that Anarchists want to skip the workers’ state, while other Communists think it’s a necessity to achieve Communism.
Please stop posting good reasons to use Linux, I already feel bad enough for the poor people stuck in Win$ and MacO$
There are still laws and it has stability so no it’s not
Anarchy means no rulers. No hierarchy. There would still be rules/laws.
Commenting with no clue what people are talking about
Anarchy isn’t a rejection of structure, but a complex web of horizontal structures.
The idea of free software is extremely socialist/communist. People working together to create something that anyone can use for free, with profit being a non-existent or at least minor motivator.
It’s a real shame that generally lefties don’t really care about or ‘get’ software freedom. You should be pushing for free software on all levels. In your personal life and in government. It’s crazy how much power a company like Apple, Microsoft or Google has over everyone.
It’s mutual. I don’t necessarily extend my expectations of a machine doing what I tell it to, out into geopolitics.
There’s a lot of overlap in useful terminology and philosophy. There’s a bit of overlap in organizational problem-solving (and problem-having). But you can be aggressively capitalist, and still recognize the benefits of stone-soup development. Even in hardware - RISC-V is going to undercut low-end ARM in embedded applications, and hard-drive manufacturers are not exactly Spanish republicans.
It’s pretty hard to fight hegemony when your salary is just built on donations. A lot of important tech is also paid for via government grants then the private sector gets to use it and erect the walled gardens when it should be in the commons.
Most big projects survive on more than just donations. The Linux kernel is developed by developers paid by some of the biggest software corporations.
I was leftie before I was techie. If you don’t know anything around tech and computers you wouldn’t know what to do. Even as a fairly tech-adjacent professional it took me quite a while.
Then again, I only became a real leftie again after kicking all the corpos out of my computer.
Tech used to be (and still is) obscured by heavy gatekeeping. We who understand a little more like to joke about those who don’t, and I guess we’ll have to stop that if we really want to unite the left. Don’t ridicule, explain. The person might never have had a chance to learn the concept.
There’s definitely a gatekeeping issue, but free software doesn’t automatically mean ‘force people to use Linux’, there’s stuff like Firefox, Libreoffice, Nextcloud, etc.
It’s things like councils working together on common software platforms instead of going with commercial vendors, supported by local companies instead of shoveling billions to Google and Microsoft that gets sent overseas immediately. It’s federal governments hiring developers directly to work on software instead of using commercial vendors.
You’re missing the entire point of the free software movement. Free as in freedom does NOT intrinsically mean free as in absence of cost. Linux exists because of companies like Cygnus who successfully marketed the Bazaar, as opposed to the Cathedral, to investors.
Stallman and Torvalds themselves have gone on record multiple times stating the utter lack of political motivation in being able to modify the software on your machine.
TIL: I must be a communist/socialist/leftist/whatever for supporting FOSS. What’s next? Marxism/Leninism? Or maybe I missed that stop, while riding the communism train. Then again, I’m already on Lemmy, so I must be into ML as well, right?
Or just think for yourself and have your own opinions about issues instead of signing up for an entire ideology.
Yep. This is the way, but it won’t stop other people from labeling you regardless.
No one is labeling you. Though you should perhaps reflect on the world around you and maybe see that adhering to an ideology is actually just applying philosophy comprehensively to all layers of society at the same time.
Well, there is also a more right leaning take. You take care of your self and scratch your own itch, and you should not be a liability to the society, but make your self useful and contribute back. And I think this is kind of the reason FLOSS works well, it can be aligned with many philosophies.
You didn’t write the kernel, write the libraries, or write the user space applications, did you? No, Linux is the product of a collaborative group of strangers working towards the same goal, a goal that largely doesn’t include any considerations for profit. You haven’t pulled yourself up by your boot straps to make Linux. Hell, even Linus didn’t do that. It’s the product of thousands of people working on it over decades. It’s not capitalist, it’s not individualistic, Linux is communal.
Eric S Raymond (ESR) is the originator of the philosophy you’re espousing. He’s a Right-Libertarian who has made a lot of contributions to and arguments about FOSS, but in this case i think he’s pretty much wrong. He was a big proponent of the BSD license and opponent of the GPL because, in his view, the GPL interfered with economic activity while BSD was more compatible with it.
ESR’s belief was that open source software was not threatened by capitalism and that it would thrive even if large companies used it, while the other side of the argument was that it would languish if all of the large users were corporations who did not (voluntarily) contribute back. In contrast, with GPL (and similar mandatory open licenses): the corporations would be required to contribute back and thus whether the usage was corporate or not the project would benefit and grow either way.
That was a while ago, though. I think we can see, now, that while the BSDs are great (and have many of their own technological advantages over Linux based OSes) and they are being used by corporations, that has not resulted in the kind of explosive growth we’ve seen with GPL software. Gross tech bros love to use both BSD-style and GPL-style code, but with GPL they’re required to contribute back. That attracts developers, too, who don’t want to see their work end up as the foundation of some new Apple product with nothing else to show for it.
So we now can pretty much call it, i think, barring new developments: the Communist (and Left-Libertarian and Anarchist) approach “won” and the Right-Libertarian approach didn’t actually pan out. GPLed software is running servers and all kinds of things even though, technically speaking, BSD was probably a better choice up until recently (until modern containerization, probably) and still has a lot going for it. The Right-Libertarian philosophy on this is a dead end.
The idea of free software isn’t political; ie socialist/communist. Free software is also compatible with free market capitalism. In a capitalist market free of coercion there is nothing that stops one from copying something then changing and/or selling it.
If you make a microwave and I buy one and reverse engineer it then I could produce and sell it just fine. Similarly, if you created a program called Adobe Photoshop, and I got a hold of the code, then I could copy and resell it. Neither capitalism nor the free market has a concept of patents or copyrights which are a political thing. Everything is free to reproduce.
Making the software free is just the logical economic price of a product with a marginal cost very close to zero. Give it away and let everyone build on top of it to make increasingly better things because that is the most efficient way to manage those resources. It’s like the progression of science. We give credit for discovery, but encourage all science to happen in the open so others can take the ideas and build on them without being encumbered.
I hope you don’t think that science is socialist/communist.
Note: After going through the trouble of writing this I became concerned that my use of the loaded term “free market capitalism” could be misunderstood so I’ve decided to define my terms. Free market capitalism isn’t a form of government. Capitalism just means stuff can be privately owned. A market is how capital is coordinated. The free refers to the market transactions being voluntary/free of coercion. So free market capitalism is the “voluntary coordination of private capital”. That definition can exist under varying forms of government which is why I argue that it isn’t a political system in itself.
This is the antithesis of free software. FOSS can not be owned. Patents and copyright are essential to capitalism. You are not allowed to copy and redistribute Adobe Photoshop, nor the music of your favorite band, movies, books, etc etc
This isn’t really correct. Free Open Source Software is very much owned. It is just that the owner doesn’t charge for it, has stated that there are rules for use and modification of the software. FOSS was a clever trick that used copyright against itself. It is was a really brilliant trick, but that trick was only necessary because copyrights exist in the first place. If copyrights didn’t exist then it wouldn’t be illegal to redistribute Adobe Photoshop.
You may argue that copyrights are necessary for the betterment of society, but that is debatable. The biggest case against copyright being necessary is, in fact, the FOSS movement. It proves we don’t actually need companies like Adobe to make all our stuff and charge a lot for it.
Free software subverts some of the rent seeking barriers put in place by capitalists (copyright and patents, both are enforced by government). I agree that a real free market wouldn’t have those things, but capitalists don’t want a free market, they want to capture the market and extract as much profit out of it for the least amount of effort.
My problem with what you said is that it isn’t just capitalists that use patents and copyrights. Russia and China have patents and copyrights. It isn’t limited to capitalists, and saying so confuses people on what the actual issues are.
Russia hasn’t been communist since 1991. Not sure what the copyright regime was in the old Soviet Union. As for China, they’ve implemented a bunch of capitalist concepts in order to interface with the wider capitalist world (as part of trade agreements, they decided to honour copyright and patents in order to be able to sell us stuff).
Just because a nominally communist country (and you can definitely argue about that in China’s case) does something, that doesn’t mean that that thing is automatically either communist or capitalist.
a capitalist funded anarcho-comunist ecosystem, ironic
Libs that think “money” = capitalism have water vapour in their skulls
Idk, technically voluntary association is a key tenet of volunteerism/anarcho-capitalism, so if we’re just using volunteering as the basis we might as well say it’s volunteerism. I think anarcho-communism and anarcho-capitalism are a bit more nuanced than “sharing.”
Anarcho-capitalism is a contradictory term that is mostly used to imagine neofeudalism.
what else is it used for?
Those advocating for it also use it to display their total lack of perspective and analysis of the mechanics of capitalism. I.e. one can use it as a sign on one’s head saying “not at home for the moment, try again later”.
Anarcho-Capitalism isn’t a thing, it’s just Libertarian Capitalists LARPing with Leftist aesthetics. The very rejection of individual ownership rejects Capitalism, it’s like saying Worker Co-operatives are an example of Capitalism because markets tend to not care what makes them up.
Just because FOSS would be “allowed” in Capitalism doesn’t mean it’s an example of Capitalist principles.
Yes and they’d argue that anarchism isn’t exclusively leftist (well, I’D argue that depends on one’s definition of left/right, because depending on who you ask it’s either good/bad, collectivism/individualism, or lib/auth, and by the latter definition they would then be leftist capitalists, which is funny to think about.) They support individual ownership without rulers, however they still promote sharing of things you own with your community if you can/want.
Right, and just because sharing is “allowed” in communism doesn’t mean sharing is communism. It being allowed in both not being necessarily representative of either is my whole point.
Regardless of what AnCaps argue, the fundamental fact is that Anarchy is a rejection of hierarchy, whereas Private Property itself requires both the Owner/Worker hierarchy, and a monopoly on violence that cannot be reasonably contested to uphold Private Property protections. As such, it can only be considered Libertarian, as it both maintains hierarchy and maintains some semblance of at minimum a nightwatchman state.
As for Left/Right, the standard definition is Collective/Individual ownership of the Means of Production, not necessarily collectivism/individualism or lib/auth. Individual ownership by definition is supporting rulers, the larger Capitalists are effectively no different from a Feudal state.
Sharing being allowed does not mean FOSS aligns with AnCap principles, that’s like saying bagel consumption is AnCap.
FOSS isn’t simply “sharing” either, it’s quite literally a rejection of Individual ownership and creating IP for the collective to use, fork, maintain, and distribute as they see fit. It isn’t a coincidence that FOSS enthusiasts overwhelmingly lean left, just like Lemmy tends to.
Regardless is right, because my comments were never about espousing the benefits of anarcho-capitalism, I was using them to make the point that simply because things share a similarity with a political ideology it does not in fact make them “that ideology.” Arguing about ancapistan in this instance is a “strawman.”
No this is my point, you get your own.
“Sharing.”
No.
Your argument is that because FOSS would be permissible in AnCap society, FOSS being fundamentally constructed upon AnCom principles of rejecting Capitalism and centralization in favor of decentralized and collectively owned and distributed property makes it not in line with Anarcho-Communism.
When the article is giving an example of how Anarcho-Communism would work, Linux is a fantastic example. Nobody is saying Linux is Anarcho-Communism, or that Linux cannot exist within broader contexts, but that in an Anarcho-Communist society, the structure of Linux and FOSS would be the common structure.
You’re being contrarion for the sake of it.
Yes.
Because voluntary association and sharing is also a core tenet of volunteerism/anarchocapitalism, as they also are of anarcho-communism…
FOSS being similar to AnCom because both share principles of sharing
makes it not necessarily Anarcho-Communist.
You’re making false equivalencies for the sake of it.
“This rejection of profit and ownership made by a self-admitted leftist is actually completely in line with for-profit individual ownership just because AnCaps don’t murder people for doing charity”
You’re just trying to be contrarion for the sake of it, lmao. Again, the article was showcasing examples of gift economies and how Anarcho-Communism would function, and Linux fits that definition. It wasn’t arguing that Linux is Anarcho-Communism itself. It is not an example of how Anarcho-Capitalism would function, as Anarcho-Capitalism is Capitalism, and FOSS is decidedly anticapitalist, even if said Capitalists wouldn’t murder Linus for rejecting Capitalism.
You’re again being needlessly contrarion, Anarcho-Capitalists don’t advocate for setting up networks of mutual aid and FOSS software, they don’t care about gift economies either. Using Linux as an example for AnCapistan would get you laughed out of the room, if calling yourself an AnCap didn’t already result in that.
I’m done, this is pointless.
Isn’t it a benevolent dictatorship with Linus at the head?
Free software doesn’t have owners. If someone else did a better job of being the “benevolent dictator” of a fork of Linux, everyone would start using that fork. Arguably this is a more free-market system than non-free software.
I’m worried we’re gonna have a situation like the death or Tito
Linus’ power doesn’t come from Ownership, but respect. Anyone can fork it and do what they want, but because Linus is respected, everyone else follows suit.
Anarchism would function in a similar manner, it wouldn’t be a bunch of opinionated people doing whatever they want, but people generally listening to experts who don’t actually hold systemic power.
Problem is that the average person cannot discern between an actual expert and a charlatan.
And yet Linux works fine. Not everyone needs to be a dev, devs can tell the difference between an expert and a charlatan.
I meant that as a reply to the second paragraph which generalised anarchism; including the non-Linux world.
I also disagree that this isn’t an issue in the broader Linux community however. See for example the loud minority with an irrational hate against quite obviously good software projects like systemd who got those ideas from charlatans or “experts”.
I know, I used Linux as an example. Just like not everyone needs to be a weatherman to trust weatherman that can recognize experts among themselves, so too can engineers recognize experts among themselves, and so forth.
Yep. This is why the voice of the people should generally speaking be ignored. This is also why 90% of people should be ignored when deciding economic policies.
I would disagree and say it’s more akin to a philosopher king hence less anarchy and more monarchy. It’s all good until the king dies and let’s see who succeeds them.
It will be most telling when Linus dies.
But a king must have power and authority, Linus just has influence and labor, thus expertise.
No, a king’s power derives from authority, not from the good will of its subjects
You can fork it, sure Linus is very respected and his decisions are considered very important but you can fork it and change however you want so it’s still compatible with Anarchism.
I thought it was an autonomous collective.
Listen, strange penguins biting people is no basis for a system of government.
I mean, if I went 'round saying I was a sysadmin just because some angry Finn lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away
Supreme executive power derives from using sudo, not some farcical user account control.
Come and see the kernel inherent in my system.
I made a commentary about it here https://lemmy.ml/post/511377 in the FLOSS vs Closed Source Philosophy section:
It’s actually a really good analogy, because it can only run on fully-capitalist hardware.
This not the dunk you think
What is “fully-capitalist hardware?”
Same sort of deal as “anarcho-communist” operating systems. @@
That answers absolutely nothing. Do you think Capitalists designed hardware, or Engineers?
I’m just gonna leave this quote as is, so you can think about it.
How the hell did you pick lemmy.ml?
Because people aren’t one dimensional objects.
And that excuses a total lack of awareness.
I have. Engineers, ie workers, designed the hardware. It was not the Capitalists that owned the companies doing the design.
It really seems like you didn’t have an actual argument, you just wanted to whine and duck away from any pushback.
Are you saying capitalists and engineers are one in the same? Maybe sometimes, but it’s not capital that makes things, it’s labor.
Well you solved that conundrum rightly. Now let’s go linch those dirty Apple and John Deere engineers. Since they’ve designed those machines, they must be the only responsible parties for designing them with their extreme anti-consumer and anti-repair policies. They must get commissions on every licensed repair or something, it’s definitely got nothing to do with capitalists putting restrictions on the design team in order to increase profits, nope…
You’re completely off on what I’m getting at. The idea of “Capitalist” hardware, as though the Capitalist did the labor, is wrong. Engineers are paid for their labor power, they don’t typically get royalties or anything of the sort, just like any other laborer.
Someone saying that FOSS software relies on Capitalist hardware is putting the Capitalist over the Engineer, as though the Capitalist created the hardware, and not the labor of the miners, assemblers, designers, engineers, and so forth, regardless of who owns the Capital the labor is done by the Workers. FOSS is agnostic to whoever owned the Means of Proruction of the hardware using or producing it.
it sanctions other CPUs and strong arms them into giving up their cycles
Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and capitalist hardware.
Fire at will, commander.
No, not the Bootlicker Beam!
What in the hell is capitalist hardware? Does my computer own a factory?
how many yards of linen for my dust filters?
which was made possible thanks to public funding.
A lot of magic can happen when scarcity vanishes, or is ephemeralized.
And the FOSS system seems to be collapsing right now for the same reason that anarcho-communism only works short-term until someone sees commercial value in it and abuses the system to the limit.
The old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook is everywhere.
And so it’s no surprise that many well-known FOSS developers are advocating for some kind of post-FOSS system that forces commercial users to pay for their usage of the software.
Considering how borderline impossible it is for some software developer to successfully sue a company to comply with GPL, I can’t really see such a post-FOSS system work well.
bro this is depressing. I think CLI projects are less likely to receive donations for some reason and more in danger
Isn’t Linux more like a benevolent dictatorship. At least the kernel development.