• testman@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      Listen, strange penguins biting people is no basis for a system of government.

      • DickFiasco@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        Supreme executive power derives from using sudo, not some farcical user account control.

      • Random Dent@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        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

  • Julian@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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      10 months ago

      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?

      • Julian@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        You can support communist/socialist policies without being a tankie. Most rational leftists do. And yeah, if you support FOSS you support a socialist idea. Same if you support public healthcare, public education, or libraries.

        • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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          10 months ago

          Just because an idea is labeled as socialist/capitalist or whatever, doesn’t inherently make it good or bad. People like to label things to simplify complicated topics, but that shortcut isn’t always worth it. Nowadays, I hear a lot of talk about this or that being socialist/communist thing as if that makes it automatically bad. Somehow, I get the feeling that most of those people are Americans. If that’s actually true, it would make a lot of sense.

          • Julian@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            I don’t think we disagree. Just thought it was interesting how closely FOSS ideas match those of communism and socialism, even though a lot of people probably don’t view it that way.

      • ExLisper@linux.community
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        10 months ago

        Or just think for yourself and have your own opinions about issues instead of signing up for an entire ideology.

          • Urist@lemmy.ml
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            10 months ago

            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.

    • PrincipleOfCharity@0v0.social
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • corvus@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        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

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • toastal@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        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.

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        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.

      • schmorp@slrpnk.net
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        10 months ago

        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.

    • snaggen@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • winterayars@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        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.

    • Nix@merv.news
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      10 months ago

      What platform is that? I’ve never seen a mastodon type platform with remote follow

      • moreeni@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        Akkoma, which is a fork of Pleroma. Twitter-like Fediverse has 3 major software pieces: Mastodon, Pleroma (and forks) and Misskey (and forks)

    • orgrinrt@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

  • centof@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    Relevant Section under Gift economies:

    The expansion of the Internet has witnessed a resurgence of the gift economy, especially in the technology sector. Engineers, scientists, and software developers create open-source software projects. The Linux kernel and the GNU operating system are prototypical examples of the gift economy’s prominence in the technology sector and its active role in using permissive free software and copyleft licenses, which allow free reuse of software and knowledge.

    Essentially the line of thought is that open source software is an example of mutual aid and the gift economy.

  • Jknaraa@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    It’s actually a really good analogy, because it can only run on fully-capitalist hardware.

      • Reil@beehaw.org
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        10 months ago

        Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and capitalist hardware.

        Fire at will, commander.

          • drndramrndra@lemmygrad.ml
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            10 months ago

            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…

            • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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              10 months ago

              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.

          • Jknaraa@lemmy.ml
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            10 months ago

            Do you think Capitalists designed hardware, or Engineers?

            I’m just gonna leave this quote as is, so you can think about it.

    • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • Atemu@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        Problem is that the average person cannot discern between an actual expert and a charlatan.

        • fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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          10 months ago

          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.

        • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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          10 months ago

          And yet Linux works fine. Not everyone needs to be a dev, devs can tell the difference between an expert and a charlatan.

          • Atemu@lemmy.ml
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            10 months ago

            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”.

            • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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              10 months ago

              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.

      • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        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.

        • JoshCodes@programming.dev
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          10 months ago

          So I did miss that Linus is in the article, but the reference to him says he was awarded the title, which makes it sound like an honour rather than a hierarchical system. I don’t believe that he’s ever been anything other than the projects owner/founder but I’m happy to learn if I’m wrong.

          • survivalmachine@beehaw.org
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            10 months ago

            Yes, that’s just how open source works. Of course they always serve at the pleasure of the community, otherwise forks would happen. Nobody said otherwise. As the “Usage” section of that article implies, the “benevolent” bit comes from the feedback loop of a happy community supporting their dictator-for-life.

    • pbpza@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      10 months ago

      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.

  • DrillingStricken@programming.dev
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    10 months ago

    Linux - open-source OS that thrives on peeps sharin’ knowledge and resources. Communal vibes bringin’ sweet tech for all. Anarcho-communism in action, ain’t that rad?

  • Corgana@startrek.website
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    10 months ago

    Cory Doctorow has a book, “Walkaway” that is basically exploring the politics of FOSS on a societal scale. It’s pretty nerdy obv but I enjoyed it and it doesn’t overly glamourize any political system the way you’d typically see in political fiction.

    • not_amm@beehaw.org
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      10 months ago

      There’s a book called Opt-Out from Rory Price about a future where humanity starts using AR more and more to the point that it’s almost obligatory to have a device of this kind for everything, even as ID. It then talks about a group that develops a free/libre version of this device’s OS and they have to decide about personal issues or try to maintain their views. It’s entertaining and not too long, but I think it shows a very possible future.

      I haven’t heard from its author in some time, but I think they discovered they were someone else too ;), that’s why I love this book.

  • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    10 months ago

    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.”

    • Urist@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      Anarcho-capitalism is a contradictory term that is mostly used to imagine neofeudalism.

        • Urist@lemmy.ml
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          10 months ago

          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”.

    • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        10 months ago

        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.

        • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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          10 months ago

          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.

          • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            10 months ago

            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.

            “Sharing.”

            • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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              10 months ago

              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.