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.
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.
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.
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!
Please stop posting good reasons to use Linux, I already feel bad enough for the poor people stuck in Win$ and MacO$
Isn’t it a benevolent dictatorship with Linus at the head?
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 thought it was an autonomous collective.
Listen, strange penguins biting people is no basis for a system of government.
Also, Linus is a “woke communist”
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.
If you’re a tankie you can be a cunt? What an absurd take.
Edit: tankie is originally too strong for Linus. Still a terrible takeaway.
Edit 2: Linus is worth 150M+, not exactly giving that away either.
Linus isn’t a tankie, and Socialism/Communism isn’t giving away money. It’s a dramatic restructuring of the economy into a Worker owned and operated one.
I’m pretty sure the economy is less worker-owned in socialism than in communism.
Depends on what exactly you mean by Socialism, but by the definitions of Socialists, no not really. Socialism is Worker Ownership of the Means of Production, plain and simple. Communism is a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society, post-Socialist. Marxist-Leninists occasionally call the transition to Communism Socialism, and as such an overall Socialist system could have Capitalism within using those terms, but other forms of Socialism such as Anarcho-Syndicalism have full worker ownership of the Means of Production without being Communist.
You’d have to define what you mean by Socialism, because I disagree, a fully Socialist economy is just as worker owned as a fully Communist economy.
I’ve never seen any kind of authoritative definition between little s and big S socialism, so if you are intending to draw a distinction based on capitalization alone, I consider that to be a semantic game. I believe there is no such distinction. I understand socialism to involve public (i.e. government) control of production, and inherently more authoritarian than true communism. In that sense, I see 20th century communist nations as more socialistic in implementation because of their emphasis on state control.
In short, socialism is just a kind of authoritarianism that pretends to be beneficent, while communism is more of a person-to-person, bottom-up ideology. On the topic of this thread, I can see how Linux and more broadly the FLOSS movement are communistic, but I see them as only marginally socialistic, at most.
I’m not making any distinction. Socialism is socialism, capitalization or not, and the common definition is plainly Worker Ownership of the Means of Production. Whether done a la Market Socialism, where worker Co-ops form the economy, or democratic Socialism where there is liberal democracy that owns industry, or Marxism, Syndicalism, etc, this doesn’t change.
What is causing you to believe Socialism is authoritarian? If production is owned collectively, rather than by mini-dictators a la Capitalism, how is this more authoritarian?
As for 20th century Socialist countries controlled by Communist parties, such as the USSR or Maoist China, no leftist believes them to have been Communism, even themselves. They were Marxist-Leninist states attempting to build Communism via Socialism, in their own words. Some leftists call them red-fascist, or State Capitalist, but every leftist agrees that they had not achieved Communism.
Following the previous discussion, FLOSS is both Communist and Socialist. All Communism is Socialist, as all Communism is focused on Worker Ownership of the Means of Production, however not all Socialism is Communist.
Makes sense?
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.
It’s actually an example of something that doesn’t work so anarcho communism
Lmao amazing
Fuck off
I did just for you. Hope that makes you feel better.
no
