Free and Open Source Software

22064 readers

535 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

Gaywallet@beehaw.org

alyaza@beehaw.org

204

Do you consider the free software movement to be an anarchist/communist project? (infosec.pub)

submitted 21 hours ago by DeckPacker@piefed.blahaj.zone to c/foss@beehaw.org

68 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This thought came to me in the shower today. Open source checks most of the boxes. It is a collaborative, worker owned (develloper-owned) project, that tries to flatten hierarchy. Especially if you look at something like Debian ), which really tries to have a bottom-up structure.
Of course, there are exceptions, considering there are a lot of corporate open-source projects, that are not democratically maintained and clearly only serve the interest of the company, who created it (like chromium for example).
So I am mainly talking about community-oriented FOSS projects here.
And if you were to agree with my statement, would you say that developing FOSS software is advancing the goals of the anarchist / communist project, because it is laying the groundwork infrastructure needed for a new kind of economy and society?
Thought this could be an interesting discussion!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] DeckPacker@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 20 hours ago

I mean, it's less about the intention and more about the reality of software development. Just because the developers back then didn't chose to do software development in an anarchist way (although I think a lot of them had that kind of mindset), doesn't mean, that they didn't do it using anarchist principles.