I have seen a lot of people compare Linux/FOSS to Communism over the years. Some of it is jokingly with an undercurrent of seriousness like you might find on reddit’s r/linuxmemes or similar stuff like the bugs bunny “Our whatever” memes. Some of it is serious comments like the old Steve Balmer mudslinging (despite him somewhat changing his opinion later)
Figure that most of the crowd here, like myself, probably aren’t big fans of communism. Just curious if that is something that annoys you guys too or not?
What kind of things you might point out to sometime who seriously thought this to convince them otherwise?
Personally, I think of the FOSS movement as being more similar to Libertarianism than to Communism but curious what others here think.
I think commies like to cling to all sorts of nice things they didn’t build.
Capitalism created open source. We don’t see all the russian or chinese or cuban open source for several reason:
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Personal computers themselves are a product of capitalist risk-taking and couldn’t exist as they did under communism. People who worked for massive companies saw a product they wanted to exist, left their huge companies and went out and built the thing they wanted. Central planners wouldn’t have ever seen the benefit of something like that.
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The concept of personal computers, as in a piece of technology that advanced that people could just own for themselves and use however they want, is opposed to the idea of the workers collectively owning the means of production. A Personal Computer is absolutely the means of production. Lots of people do most of their work on one today.
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The concept of the GPL requires ownership of Intellectual Property. You can’t prevent people from exploiting the code you own and force them to contribute back if nobody owns code.
Open source certainly is a commons, but having common property is not communism.
Note that the Fediverse is owned by many individuals and contributed to by many individuals. Some of those people have bought considerable capital equipment to run their instances. People own servers, they own space to put those servers, they own network equipment. They have lesiure time to run the sites.
In my view, it’s a boon of capitalism that happened to produce a commons. Meanwhile, the commies are fighting to tear it down because that’s all they know how to do. Thanks for the DDOS’s you scum!
I try to understand what some of these communist say. I think the idea is that communism must come after capitalism. So like; capitalism is a stepping stone for a more advanced society. I’m not really sure because i’ve also heard cavemen were communist.
There’s a form of communism that is markedly different from modern communism called tribal communism. It most certainly does have hierarchies, and often but not always it is patriarchal.
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It’s a difficult one. To be honest much of the linux movement was brought about by by the gnu movement which was started by Richard Stallman
Now obviously linux was started by Linus Torvalds. Who I wouldn’t call communist, maybe socialist.
Richard on the other hand heavily used Communist talking points in his arguments.
Richard didn’t think you should be able to make profit off software. He was super mad when his more talented classmate sold the rights of emacs to some company for big bucks. So he copied all the source code and gave it away to everyone for free. Under a different license. Which was very illegal but no one could sue him because he had no money. The company is even on record saying they can’t sue a homeless man.
so richard goes on and on about digital oppression. Software sellers are the bourgeoisie and users are the proletariat basically.
It wasn’t actual communism and was almost always done in a light hearted way almost as a joke. But also extremely seriously.
So back to communism linux and such. Richard’s main claim to fame is that modern day copy right doesn’t serve the people anymore.
He is probably right about that. Disney should not be able to stop me from selling graphic novels of mickey mouse.
So he and others helped create software licenses as a way to work in the current system. That is how gnu came about. And it did have Marxist roots.
You could say the gnu 3.0 license is communist, 2.0 is socialist and the MIT license is libertarian.
But communism was a specific ideology that came about in a time when there was mass suffering in factories, massive inequality and you just can’t really apply it to software.
Ultimately, people wanted to share their code and know that companies will give back if they use it and that is what linux is about.
It’s not communism, it’s gnu. It’s a different movement that came about for a different need. The need to share code without worrying to much if a company made money off it because you could atleast get their changes back.
So I think,
yes and no?
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Yeah I think that might be a better way to put it. He did get really angry at his friend making money off emacs.
But mostly listening to him talk he would go on a on about how compiled code could do anything and you wouldn’t know. And that this is oppression. So you should always have the source code. He won’t read websites in a browser. He downloads the html and reads offline in a little netbook that has a open source firmware.
They must’ve forgotten than Linux’s code contributions these day mostly comes from companies such as Intel, Microsoft, Facebook etc.
Same is true for many other FOSS projects too. And open standards are mostly created by companies that collaborate because the industries as a whole will benefit from working well together as ecosystems.
