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:
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.
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.
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.