I’ve seen so much confusion between the two, at first I thought it was trolls, but it’s so consistent that I’ve begun to wonder if they actually don’t understand.
I’ve seen so much confusion between the two, at first I thought it was trolls, but it’s so consistent that I’ve begun to wonder if they actually don’t understand.
Wow - that is pretty extreme. That doesn’t totally surprise me though - FOSS is also very leftwing and it seems to apply to most of the tech communities. Not sure why - maybe they see the whole world as a huge algorithm and that inequality is a bug that can and must be fixed (top down approach). Unfortunately the world isn’t predictable and human nature isn’t compatible with communism and only societies that thrive due to capitalism can absorb some socialism. I don’t know any poor society that used socialism to get itself out of poverty. It is always capitalism that does the trick.
FOSS has a lot of leftwing advocates because it distributes the means of (software) production. The initial idea was inspired by Communism. Lemmy has a lot of FOSS people in the tech communities so you see the spillover there. You’re possibly more used to seeing the Silicon Valley type of tech people who are right wing if not anarchnocapitalists.
I’ve been a GNU/Linux user for decades. I know RMS but I don’t think he is or ever was a communist. He isn’t against capitalism and is fine with people making money of free software. He stepped out of FOSS and I haven’t followed what’s currently going on though. Most tech I find interesting is decentralized, private and open source. You might be right that on the closed software side they are more right wing.
Lemmy is nice. Software itself doesn’t have a political view and it doesn’t seem to care who is using it 😊
The initial idea was because companies distributed the source code along with the machine code because machine code didn’t work across diverse machines. People would modify the source code to add features and send it back to the original company who would then add it in.
It was a capitalist thing, it was all voluntary. Communism is all about forcing people.
Unless you think IBM is communist.
I see your confusion, I just said FOSS and I should have said FOSS movement to be more clear. Double-checking myself shows that the FOSS orgs tend to be apolitical, so I should have instead said compatible with communist views.
You state that communism is all about forcing people, however communism is defined as a stateless classless society. How would you force people in such a situation?
IBM is most certainly capitalist, they just realized they could benefit from open source software once they fell behind MS. Being able to share development costs is still beneficial in a capitalist economy, even if you don’t privately own the end product. Just like how sharing the cost of healthcare can be beneficial for the social welfare.
Communism in practice. Communism the theory is impossible. There’s conflicts in society, what happens if a worker doesn’t want to work in communism?
IBM was doing open source in 1952, 23 years before Microsoft was founded. You should really do some background research. To get you started, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-source_software
Since you didn’t disagree, it sounds like we both agree that the FOSS movement is compatible with communist ideals.
Only the theory impacts the founding of the FOSS movement so communism in practice is irrelevant.
I’ve been talking about the FOSS movement this entire time, which dates to 1983. IBM only started interacting with the modern FOSS movement in a significant way in the 90s per https://www.ibm.com/opensource/story/
Foss is neither communist nor capitalist. It’s just a way to distribute software. If anything it’s capitalist since to survive they sell support and other things. It’s just one model of many. If you look it’s mainly for profit companies investing in it. Look at the top contributors for many projects and they are for profit companies donating to the project.
Why are the donors relevant? This is like arguing that Yugoslavia wasn’t communist because they received foreign aid from the US.
“They sell support and other things” Most (all?) theories of communism don’t have currency when they reach the communist stage but if you’re trying to make a socialist structure work in capitalism it would look like free open source projects.
There is nothing socialist about foss. I have worked on foss projects for twenty years. I get paid. We charge for our product. What is socialist about that?
The workers don’t control anything. The large companies contributing are in control.