TIL that operating system Linux is an example of anarcho-communism

en.wikipedia.org Anarchist communism - Wikipedia

Free and Open Source Software @beehaw.org

en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Anarchist_communism

71 6

You're viewing a single thread.

292 comments

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.
  
  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.
  
  I explained to finance why we had to purchase licenses for for a UI library. To justify the costs, they asked what the alternative was. I told them we don't have the talent or resources to develop our own UI library... But I offered up free open source alternatives.
  Unfortunately the FOSS stuff never gets approved by IT due to vulnerability / threats.
  
  But is FOSS actually more vulnerable?
  
  Depends, sometimes not always. Having source available makes it easy for hackers to find exploit but also makes it easier for community to identify and address exploits.
  So... For a large active community project, it's likely fairly secure but for smaller projects with 1 or just a few developers it might be vulnerable.
  
  Yeah, if a stereotypical construction union rep feels judged by the FOSS world why would they try.
  My local bike coop apparently used to run mint on their computer, but when the person who set it up left town it was too much for the bike nerds who weren’t mad engineers (this person also built an electrolysis tub, that had to be gotten rid of when they left Idk if they were actually an engineer by profession, but my dumb engineer ass keeps hearing they did shit I want to do). They’d go back if it was the same, but windows just works for them and linux needed someone to make it work.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  Outside of the actual cabling and the initial internet what tech has is government funded that's controlled by vc tech?
  
  Most big projects survive on more than just donations. The Linux kernel is developed by developers paid by some of the biggest software corporations.
  
  It's really too bad the original innovators got subsumed by capitalist 'tech bros.'
  
  The hippies were always capitalist adjacent. Many of them became the Jesus freaks and yuppies.
  There were actual leftist movements happening at the time, but those were more of minorities beginning the discussions on how to actively demand power. Black power, gay liberation, women’s liberation, and American communism. Some of this did coincide with the tech hippies.
  The California ideology was there from the start.
  
  As a linux leftie, I fully agree. It’s hard to convince people though. Also, I don’t necessarily think it’s the best intro to leftism for layfolk. It’s a great into to leftism for tech nerds and a great intro to tech for left nerds, but the punk who just uses the library computer doesn’t care. Unions are often the easiest intro to leftism for people and not many union folks are interested in learning free software.
  I was out drinking the other day and an IBCW friend introduced me to a union brother of his and they’re smart guys who believe in the power of labor, hell they even excitedly showed me that there’s a professionals union in the AFL-CIO, but if I tried to explain a terminal to them they’d look at me like I grew several heads at once.
  Free software is great praxis, but it often suffers by the fact that it isn’t what people are used to. That there are intro free softwares like GIMP, libreoffice, and basically anything where FOSS is the default. We can do this, but I think it’s definitely going to not be the easiest sell.
  
  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.
  
  I'm sure they wouldn't collect personal data for nefarious purposes.. Or abuse what they collect 🤔
  Big tech that is...
- 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.
- 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.
  
  That phrase that you said has absolutely nothing to do with the Linux/Libre philosophy.
  You take care of your self and scratch your own itch
  While I understand that you meant to make an analogy with people creating the projects they want to use, the vast majority of people don't create their projects, and instead contribute to others, and they contribute with existing issues not necessarily things that they want or need. Alternatively you can see that a lot of issues are fixed by people who are not affected by it, it's very common for issues to ask people to test specific changes to see if they solved the issue they were facing.
  and you should not be a liability to the society
  The vast majority of people just use the software that the community maintains, and when they need a feature they open a PR and let the community implement it. So the vast majority of people are a liability to the community, even if you contribute to one project actively you use several others that you've never contributed to.
  but make your self useful and contribute back.
  This has nothing to do with right-wing philosophy, in fact most right wing people are against any form of contribution,
  And I think this is kind of the reason FLOSS works well, it can be aligned with many philosophies.
  You might not like it, but FLOSS is extremely aligned with left wing ideology, where people contribute to the community because they want to and the community provides back without asking anything in return.
  
  So, what you say is that any free society is by definition communism, since society is built on people contributing by free will? Not sure I follow.
  
  People in capitalist economies do not contribute out of free will. They contribute so they won't starve.
  
  I dont think so, that isn't necessarily the case. I think people in capitalist economies can also contribute out of their own free will, because they have fun with the project. To put it so that they only do it not to starve is, in my opinion, too harsh. I do lots of things in this economy because I have fun with them, not because I dont want to starve. However, I think that of course the aspect "I need food" is always a factor and an influence. Just very often not the only one.
  
  Of course capitalism operates in a lot of gray areas, it's how it seems freer than it actually is. "I need food" isn't always a problem, but it is one often enough to be systemically problematic. Abandoning one's hopes and dreams because one must be "realistic" is the norm.
  
  I think you raise a good point, I agree. Especially that the problem is very systematic.
  
  Yeah, what I said is an exaggeration. A tiny portion of the population will never have to do a day of work in their lives because they're bankrolled by daddy. Other people will have free time because of the efforts of the labor movement. Some people are lucky to have jobs they like. But, unless you're super rich, the threat is always there. Capitalists are working hard to roll back labor rights. You could lose your job. You're always a few bad days away from needing to take a shit job so you can eat.
  
  Okay, makes sense - I fully agree. Just wanted to clarify :)
  
  Now, you are just making shit up, to fit your own beliefs. Have fun with that mental masturbation.
  
  I have to admit, this reply has dumbfounded me. Well done.
  
  Well the argument "People in capitalist economies do not contribute out of free will" is something you just pull out of your ass, to define your side as the ones that will "contribute out of free will" (hence, the good side). This is the same logic you see in religious cults, where they define that themselves are moral and right, and the outside immoral. It really doesn't deserve any serous response since there is no response that will be able to penetrate that kind of brainwash.
  
  I'm sorry, it's just that I can't imagine you live in the same world I do. Maybe it's different for you, I saw you said you live in a socialist country so you may not be aware that in capitalist countries most people hate their jobs. It's so woven into the fabric of our society I'm shocked someone wouldn't know that. It's the subject of jokes:
  Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.
  -- Drew Carey
  Monday, the start of the work week, is generally loathed. There's an acronym: TGIF, thank god it's friday, the end of the workweek. Polls show 40% of people think their jobs make no meaningful contribution to society:
  YouGov, a data-analytics firm, polled British people, in 2015, about whether they thought that their jobs made a meaningful contribution to the world. Thirty-seven per cent said no, and thirteen per cent were unsure—a high proportion, but one that was echoed elsewhere. (In the functional and well-adjusted Netherlands, forty per cent of respondents believed their jobs had no reason to exist.)
  https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-job-boom
  Anyway, I guess I'll go back to my "religious cult," where we separate people into good and bad categories. For instance, one way we could do that is to say that other people are in a religious cult because they separate people into good and bad categories, hence they are bad people.
  
  You're the one applying morals where there is none.
  Communism is not about morality and we doesn't have a moral judgment of the world. It's simply looking at the material reality of things and them formulating ideas from that, the exact opposite of idealism (religion is a form of idealism).
  What that user said is an exageration, sure, but they are not far off. Your only options under capitalism are work and pray to earn enough to pay for rent, or live in the streets. There's no choice here, you have no safety nets, no certainty.
  The reality is that the biggest FOSS projects are usually bankrolled by companies that need them, not because of some moral good, but because it makes more monetary sense to do it that way.
  Now for the other side, projects with no money incentive involved, where people contribute because they want too, usually are slow or in need of more contributors, precisely because, under capitalism, they don't have enough free time, they need to worry about their full time job and all the other priorities in their lives before they can sit down and contribute some code.
  Again, there no moral judgement here, it's simply a description of the material reality.
  
  Any society that is not communism is not free. If your continued existence is dependant on you working for a wage you are not free. Being "free" to sign a contract that removes your rights so you can work and thus eat is not freedom.
  A free society does not need to coerce you into doing things that are good for society. You do them because they are fun or fulfilling. In other words, the same reason people work on open source software.
  
  "OK" , just remind me, which are the free communist countries again?
  
  They don't exist
  
  There are no communist countries. Only Communist countries. Communism is an authoritarian state economic system that is nominally left leaning. Whereas communism is largely against states and state power, and very libertarian in the original sense.
  So the answer to your question is that technically all communist countries are free. You just don't know the difference.
  
  Ahhh... the communist countries are where all the unicorn lives... got it!
  
  No, the actual problem is that you aren't learning. Nor are you trying to. I literally just explained to you that there is a difference between Communism and communism. And what that difference was. Your only response. Sadly to cling to the same propaganda canard.
  There are no communist countries. Therefore, technically all of them are free and technically all of them are not free. Because they don't exist. Communist countries on the other hand are socially very unfree.
  I truly hope you are not a programmer despite posting from a programming themed instance. If on accident you are, my sympathies to whoever hires you. Because you show the inability to differentiate between a variable name and a variable type.
  
  You have understood that there doesn't exist any country that meets you utopian communist view, yet you have not stopped to think about why that is.
  
  No. Literally now you are projecting. I know the reason why. And I can state it clearly. And I've already stated it to you. The reason is that communists don't want a state. Therefore, the idea of a state being communist is an oxymoron. Communists on the other hand, reject parts of communism wholesale. The USSR, PRC and DKPR call/called themselves Communist. Yet they all had more in common with dictatorial juntas and fascism than they did with communism.
  At this point, you are basically asserting that a string named int is nothing but an integer.
  
  Country is a little vague so I'll supliment state in it's place. I'd argue there are communist societies but no communist states. "communist states" may be an oxymoron.
  A useful way to think about self described communist states is that they are attempting to build communism. Whether or not their strategies are effective is up for rigorous debate of course.
  Communist societies on the other hand have existed since the dawn of humanity. I read an interesting book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. They cover a variety of indigenous groups' economies and social structures. Some could be described as communism, others were as exploitative or worse than our current society. The San tribes are a modern example of an egalitarian society or maybe more accurately a group of egalitarian societies. I'm also interested in the Zapatistas and what the folks in Northern Syria are doing but I doubt they constitue communism.
  Anyway I'm no authority on these things but I hope you found the perspective interesting. The audiobook for the Dawn of Everything is fastinating and a local library might have a copy if you want to check it out.
  
  First let's setup some terminology so we're not confusing terms.
  Free means no money, or monetary value, is needed. i.e As in "free beer"
  Free can also mean no obligations or reprehensions, e.g. Free speech.
  To avoid confusion let's refer to the freedom one as Libre, i.e. free beer, libre speech.
  Secondly I never said communism, since communism has a hard definition imposed by their creators, I said left-wing, for the purposes of this discussion let's agree on a middle term of socialism to mean the opposite of capitalism, or if you prefer a type of government associated with left wing parties, which involve social policies and free services.
  With those definitions out of the way: Is any free society by definition socialist? It is my opinion that yes, any society that's past the need for money it's by definition socialist, whereas any society that uses money (or monetary equivalents) it's capitalist.
  Libre or authoritarian governments can exist on either side of the spectrum of economical policies, so if you meant to ask whether is any libre society by definition socialist? My answer would be no, you can have societies where you have freedom but things cost money. That being said I believe that no society can be truly Libre unless the basic structure and needs are free.
  
  I understand the simplification, but neither post scarcity nor elimination of money is necessary for establishing socialism. There just needs to be a fair and even allocation of it, which mostly necessitates eliminating private ownership of capital.
  
  I hope this is a lightbulb moment for you
  
  Yes it is, but not in the way you hope. I live in a socialist country, but I'm still stunned about the level of the communist delusions people seems to have here.
  
  Social democracy isn't really socialist...
  Anyways it's just good to know that FOSS is built upon anarchist principles (of course, this doesn't mean every FOSS project is anarchist) and is a great example of free association in practice. It helps demystify anarchism and communism.
  Also what "delusions" are you talking about? Marxist-leninist ones?
  
  The desillusions people seems to have here is the same kind you have for religious people and moral, where the religious people claim that religion is what provides moral, and hence non-religious people cannot know right from wrong. It seems that in the same way, people in this discussion have defined that communism is the mechanism for being generous and being willing to contribute to society. Hence, all non-communist societies cannot exists, since nobody will build it. Basically, it is a very brainwashed take on communism, not based on anything existing but on some fantasy, especially since all practical attempts at communism seems to requires to strip people of all their freedoms.
  
  When you talk about communism, are you talking about marxist-leninist / socialist states, or communism the idea(l) itself? Also how familiar are you with anarchism?
  It seems that in the same way, people in this discussion have defined that communism is the mechanism for being generous and being willing to contribute to society.
  You're not far off, but yes that is more or less all that "communism" is:
  a classless, stateless, humane society based on common ownership, follows the maxim "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
  There is no prescription for how this may be achieved or how it might operate. Marxist-leninists want to reach it with a vanguard party and a socialist state, and this reflects how they see revolution as an event. Anarcho-communists instead see revolution as a process, and praxis takes the form of grassroots movements, aiming to bring about the necessary social change, building systems of free association from the ground up.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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?
  
  If you believe, for a particular issue, that people should work together to create something that anyone can use for free, then for that particular issue you do have a socialist ideology. That's the definition of a socialist policy, other examples of this are public education, public health care, or Universal Basic Income. You might disagree with healthcare being public, but agree that education should be, people are not entirely socialist or capitalist, each issue can have a different answer.
  People, especially those in the US and Brazil, need to stop thinking communism/socialism are bad terms and look at them for what they really are and analyse the specific issue at hand.
  
  Socialist policies are popular in polling. But as soon as they get called out as socialist, people shut down and revert to their mass produced programming. Capitalism good! Socialism Bad!
  
  Just some leftover trauma from the Red Scare days, I guess.
  
  Universal Basic Income i'll have to disagree with (not inherently, rather in nearly all proposed implementations), look into Negative Income Tax, which to my knowledge, was purported by Milton Friedman. A notable economist, known for Monetarism, and advising Reagan during his Reaganomics thing.
  
  Socialism has to to with collective ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods, not cost to the consumer. Goods and services may typically be free at the time of use (funded by taxes ahead of time) but that does NOT mean free as in without cost.
  Again, like most of the other people in this thread, you're confusing free as in freedom (software movement), and free as in without cost.
  I agree that socialism is not the scary term that staunch capitalists seem to believe that it is. However, perpetuating misunderstandings about what socialism means will not help find a healthy balance.
  
  Don't we all collectively own the Linux kernel for all practical purposes, for example? Any of us can just check it out and do with it whatever we want (within the limits of the GPL).
  
  I'm most definitely not confusing those terms since my native language uses different words for each. Read my other reply, I use the terms free and libre when I think there's need for clarification. Since socialist policies revolve around collective ownership and public distribution there's no meaning to saying they are libre, only free as in free beer makes any sense in this context.
  
  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.

292 comments