Free and Open Source Software

22064 readers

291 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

211

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

submitted 1 day 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

[–] thethrilloftime69@feddit.online 5 points 1 day ago

Free software is about building a society more strongly based on individual rights. At least Marxism-Leninism certainly isn’t about that

I suggest you read some Marxist literature. Marxism has become a bad word in the West because it undermines exploitation under capitalism. But everything Marx and Lenin espoused was based on improving the rights of individuals (you could make a convincing argument that the structure of the Soviet Union was incapable of accomplishing that goal, but that it got closer than anything American capitalism has been able to).

My personal rec is State and Revolution by Lenin. It's short and easy to read.