Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)
Linux and open source in general completely blow apart capitalist arguments that profit motive is necessary for innovation and technological advancement. Open source ecosystem primarily run by volunteers has produces some of the most interesting and innovative technologies that we've seen. The reality is that people make interesting things because they're curious and they enjoy making stuff. Pretty much nobody makes anything interesting with profit being the primary motive.
Also without open source the capitalist tech sector would collapse
It wouldn't necessarily collapse (it wasn't exactly suffering before FOSS stuff "hit the shelves", so to speak) but the gatekeeping that comes with it would certainly cause a tremendous amount of stagnation
I work in software development. Almost all modern architecture would collapse without the open source ecosystem.
Half the user-facing internet broke for a few hours when one guy withdrew a shitty one-liner piece of JavaScript (the whole leftpad thing) because someone somewhere added it as a dependency to a dependency to a dependency until it was pulled into an enormous frontend library. The internet relies more on random open source contributions than a lot of people are aware of.
I do too. To be clear, I did NOT mean that we could go without it today. What I meant was that if we didn't have it to start with, things would've likely still developed albeit much more slowly.
I'll also preface this by saying I definitely slightly misread everything before and so my reply was kinda crappy
What I meant was that if we didn't have it to start with, things would've likely still developed albeit much more slowly.
I dont think we will ever know, but Im not sure I agree. I dont know what the landscape would look like without relying on open source and patent theft. A lot of the stuff would probably not be financially viable.
This is true to some extent, but the best, most successful open source software is nowadays to a large extent made by for-profit businesses developing it for their own use but sharing it with the world.
There is a strong correlation between "is this kind of software mainly used by businesses vs. individuals" and "does this kind of software tend to be open source". Hardly anyone uses proprietary version control or web server software anymore. But (other extreme) in the area of video games, nearly all of them are still proprietary and probably will be for a long time. Software such as web browsers or office suites sits somewhere in between, both kinds exist there.
Biggest and most popular projects are attractive to companies as well as individuals for the same reasons. However, the original point was that companies are not needed for open source to exist or for innovation to happen.
I disagree somewhat.
A lot of high tech development comes with a greed motive, e.g. IPO, or getting bought out by a large company seeking to enter the space, e.g. Google buying Android, or Facebook buying Instagram and Oculus.
And conversely, a lot of open source software are copies of commercially successful products, albeit they only become widely adopted after the originals have entered the enshittified phase of their life.
Is there a Lemmy without Reddit? Is there a Mastodon without Twitter? Is there LibreOffice without Microsoft Office and decades of commercial word processors and spreadsheets before that? Or OpenOffice becoming enshittified for that matter? Is there qBittorrent without uTorrent enshittified? Is there postgreSQL without IBM's DB2?
The exception that I can see is social media and networked services that require active network and server resources, like Facebook YouTube, or even Dropbox and Evernote.
Okay, The WELL is still around and is arguably the granddaddy of all online services, and has avoided enshittification, but it isn't really open source.
The idea that these things wouldn't exist without commercial analogs is silly. You do realize that things like BBS boards and IRC existed long before commercial social media platforms right? In fact, we might've seen things like social media evolve in completely different directions if not for commercial platforms setting standards based on attracting clicks, and monetizing users.
all the for profit things we use are worse because they are for profit.
most of the time a site or service UI is made worse it's because AB testing found the worse UI wastes user's time and the metrics read that as engagement.
Exactly, most of the bloat on commercial sites isn't there for the benefit of the user, but rather in order to monetize them. It's ads, trackers, metrics, and all the other garbage that you don't actually want.
I too just turned into a Marxist after finding out about Linux and software freedom in 2020 lol
I think there might be more than a handful of us. Welcome, comrade.
Context for those who are baffled (I was)
https://news.itsfoss.com/linus-torvalds-woke-communists/
No Linus hasn't grabbed a red rag and isn't off to foment revolution
unfortunately I think this is just him saying he's a "woke communist" if being a woke communist is atheism, women's rights, and gun control. I don't think he's a marxist of any stripe it seems. However, I am willing to be corrected here. I've only seen this post regarding to him
Part of how I got here involves reading an assload of textfiles from the '90s and growing disillusioned with the fruits of that optimistic '90s techno-libertarianism
Linus Torvalds is a "full-blown woke communist"? Citation needed.
I have been a FOSS enthusiast since my preteen or early teenage years (mid-to-late 2000s), yet I am not in any sense a communist.
https://news.itsfoss.com/linus-torvalds-woke-communists/
"I am one of those woke communists"
unfortunately I think this is just him saying he's a "woke communist" if being a woke communist is atheism, women's rights, and gun control. I don't think he's a marxist of any stripe it seems. However, I am willing to be corrected here. I've only seen this post regarding to him.
But Linux is
if libs are comfortable calling themselves commie in any context that makes our job easier.
I don't think it has a meaningful effect. Libs call themselves socialists all the time. For every case you're able to argue for socialism and not have people's brains shut down, you get 10 "those tankies aren't real socialists! Socialism is when you
for food stamps and means-tested college subsidies"
His dad was a straight up member of the Finnish Communist Party. He's still alive, and is even a member of the European Parliament, but seems more liberal/centrist these days.
Linus himself seems to be pretty mum on politics.
He made a comment sarcastically and replied to an accusation labeling himself as such
I feel called out.
I'm not quite there yet but im definitly at the second to last block
If you'd like to discuss the subject, there are many comms on a handful of instances where people would be happy to!
What? These things are not related to each other by a good margin. In fact, since the FOSS is completely orderless, it goes against communism; which requires some sort of order just to be able to function. But either way, the parallel is not there or questionable at best, not to mention irrelevant.
Can we NOT drag useless politics into FOSS?
Yeah guys, can we NOT drag politics into the Free Software movement? Everyone knows that IP law and the whole struggle against proprietary software and the giant corporations that push it is non-political.
I agree, FOSS not only appeals to communists but also to the most extreme libertarians.
Everyone acting in their own selfish interests, using the code they need and writing code to scratch their itch. Forking when they want.
The idea of a fork (I'm not happy, I'm going to do my own thing) is absolutely not a communist concept. Communism is usually centralized planification.
Is the core tenet of FOSS not about depriving any entity monopoly over the means of software production? That's basically the definition of socialism, as opposed to a fundamental of libertarianism - the incontrovertible holiness of private property.
Many will scream 'but FLOSS is political'. In fact the opposite is true! FLOSS is a reaction against the political imposition called Intellectual Property. It is ANTI-political!
true, just like anti-fascist partisans during world war 2 were ANTI-POLITICAL, it was just a reaction against the POLITICAL IMPOSITION called fascism /s
For me, it was around 2015ish when I first installed Linux after learning about it from someone that was detasselling in a corn field with me. Then around 2017-2020ish, I eventually became radicalized (2017 is when net neutrality was killed, even though around 80% of Americans supported it, which made me question our government and economy).
welcome comrade!
