Free and Open Source Software

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

submitted 18 hours ago by DeckPacker@piefed.blahaj.zone to c/foss@beehaw.org

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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!

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[–] for_some_delta@beehaw.org 4 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I consider FOSS a step toward prefiguring an anarchy.

Current source control management systems however perpetuate heirarchies with roles such as maintainer and developer with different permissions. I like to keep the permissions similar for roles. I might take away foot guns like force push from developers.

Another problem limiting anarchy is consensus. Getting agreement from everyone effected is still not quite there in the merge request process.

[–] unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 hours ago

But you can fork it and make your own thing. Standard hierarchy has much more power over resources. Git's hierarchy is almost simbolic.