Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)
Linux and open source in general completely blow apart capitalist arguments that profit motive is necessary for innovation and technological advancement. Open source ecosystem primarily run by volunteers has produces some of the most interesting and innovative technologies that we’ve seen. The reality is that people make interesting things because they’re curious and they enjoy making stuff. Pretty much nobody makes anything interesting with profit being the primary motive.
I disagree somewhat.
A lot of high tech development comes with a greed motive, e.g. IPO, or getting bought out by a large company seeking to enter the space, e.g. Google buying Android, or Facebook buying Instagram and Oculus.
And conversely, a lot of open source software are copies of commercially successful products, albeit they only become widely adopted after the originals have entered the enshittified phase of their life.
Is there a Lemmy without Reddit? Is there a Mastodon without Twitter? Is there LibreOffice without Microsoft Office and decades of commercial word processors and spreadsheets before that? Or OpenOffice becoming enshittified for that matter? Is there qBittorrent without uTorrent enshittified? Is there postgreSQL without IBM’s DB2?
The exception that I can see is social media and networked services that require active network and server resources, like Facebook YouTube, or even Dropbox and Evernote.
Okay, The WELL is still around and is arguably the granddaddy of all online services, and has avoided enshittification, but it isn’t really open source.
The idea that these things wouldn’t exist without commercial analogs is silly. You do realize that things like BBS boards and IRC existed long before commercial social media platforms right? In fact, we might’ve seen things like social media evolve in completely different directions if not for commercial platforms setting standards based on attracting clicks, and monetizing users.
capitalist arguments that profit motive is necessary for innovation and technological advancement
I don’t know who is arguing this because it’s incredibly stupid. The greatest scientific minds of history, the mathematicians, the physicists, the inventors, were not capitalists, they’re people with passion for their work.
If we move to a society that guarantees basic human needs and good education, we’re only going to have more scientists and engineers that progress technology even faster.
The Linux to trans anarchocommunist catgirl pipeline is very real. The moment you move to Arch it’s already over.
I think there is something fundamental about the pull of investigating, understanding, and reading that leads to so much crossover between the two.
In my experience I’ve noticed Linux tends to (disproportionately) attract both libertarians and socialists/communists. I feel like I run into more of both within the Linux community than I do in other communities.
I started using Linux because I couldn’t force myself to use Windows 8. Up to that point I used whatever version of Windows came right before the graphical interface but 8 was too awful so I started playing with mint and never went back…
I got off the capitalism train in the middle of that but that was only because I decided to major in business and when I saw how the sausage was made I jumped ship but I didn’t know anything about socialism or communism or marxism or whatever you want to call it. I was so not into politics or economics that I literally had to search the Internet and ask people on social media what was an alternative to the crap I was reading for my classes… And then I went down that rabbit hole. If was enlightening. I learned a lot.
Also… for people who think college is Marxist indoctrination…Marx was brought up for one paragraph in one book at the very very end of my 4 years. But by that point I already knew who he was just from the rabbit hole I went down when I was curious for some alternative to what I was being taught.
Just began using Linux, was already Marxist
ITT: people who have no idea what communism is
I feel called out.
I’m not quite there yet but im definitly at the second to last block
relatable
…I just didn’t want windows advertising to me.
On Lemmy? Shock
Am I doing it wrong because I’ve use Ubuntu (12 years) and Kali Linux (8 years) and… I’m still not a marxist?
Skill issue
What? These things are not related to each other by a good margin. In fact, since the FOSS is completely orderless, it goes against communism; which requires some sort of order just to be able to function. But either way, the parallel is not there or questionable at best, not to mention irrelevant.
Can we NOT drag useless politics into FOSS?
Yeah guys, can we NOT drag politics into the Free Software movement? Everyone knows that IP law and the whole struggle against proprietary software and the giant corporations that push it is non-political.
Many will scream ‘but FLOSS is political’. In fact the opposite is true! FLOSS is a reaction against the political imposition called Intellectual Property. It is ANTI-political!
true, just like anti-fascist partisans during world war 2 were ANTI-POLITICAL, it was just a reaction against the POLITICAL IMPOSITION called fascism /s
In my view Torvalds is more of a pragmatic stoicist.
You do know Capitalism was making the slave trade unfeasable. Technology is superior at mass production. It increasingly made sense to invest in machinery etc. The most skilled slaves were eventually given free reign and only had to pay a fee to their master. White nations and their Capitalist technology ended slavery - at least in the Western world.
I have trouble imagining ever being proud of being a communist. It’s right up there with all the bad things in society.
