this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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But it's not leftist. Stallman certainly wanted it to be when he created the GPL, but it has worked incredibly well (and perhaps better) as a capitalist structure. It turns out, things like standards reduce costs overall, so you'll get a better return on your capital by cooperating with others than keeping everything to yourself.
You can see this across the board. Most products are a derivative of other works, and being able to focus on your unique value proposition dramatically reduces costs and thus increases return on capital.
The whole notion of intellectual property is anti-capitalist, it's government protectionism. Before IP laws were a thing, people built on each other's innovations without restraint. Sometimes that lead to copycat works, and sometimes it lead to new works. IP law restricts derivative works, FOSS allows it, but puts limitations on them. I personally believe IP laws are one of the biggest hurdles to innovation and believe we should have much shorter patent and copyright duration to encourage more derivative works. FOSS is but one way to get around the current system.
No, it's because the leadership is stupid.
There are other privacy-respecting, "capitalist" companies that do just fine, they just have a different profit model. However, it just so happens that the masses seem to prefer paying with data and ad time over money for services. I don't, so I avoid ad-supported services, mostly because I think that runs counter to the type of content I want to see. Sometimes that means I use FOSS, and sometimes that means I use privacy-respecting proprietary software.
When I used Reddit, I paid for an ad-free, proprietary mobile app. I'd do the same today if Reddit allowed fair competition with its app. But they have decided that ads, data collection, and mass appeal are the direction they want to go.
I certainly believe that's true, I just don't think FOSS is inherently leftist. It's a tool that works well both for capitalist and socialist interests, it has no economic or political bias.
Here are some areas where I think leftist structures are superior:
I absolutely do have some leftist views, in fact I'm probably more left than both major US parties, on net. The left/right spectrum isn't as interesting to me as the liberty/authoritarian spectrum. I want government to be less involved in my life, and I don't really care if the solutions that make that happen come from the left or the right. But to me, FOSS isn't either, it's just a way for me to decide how I want my work to be used by others.
Oh, but it is. Leftism is a rejection of hierarchy and individual ownership of the Means of Production, while FOSS is a rejection of ownertship. Again, you're incorrectly tying Capitalist entities taking advantage of leftist products as a way to call the leftist products Capitalist. FOSS itself is leftist, regardless of who uses it.
IP is absolutely Capitalist, Capitalism is all about profiting off of ownership of property, as opposed to creating Value. Rent-seeking is built into Capitalism, that's why it still exists, it consolidates power and influences the state. Believing Capitalism contains within itself the contradictions that work against itself is a leftist belief, after all!
Capitalist companies can certainly choose to make a better product, but that does not mean Reddit's choice to pursue profit over a better product was not caused by Capitalism.
All in all, I really do think you need to understand that structures themselves can be left and used by right wing entities. FOSS is leftist itself and does not care who uses it, that does not make it Capitalistic if a Capitalist uses it.
But it's not. If it was, I could relicense any GPL project to whatever I want because nobody owns it. The GPL is very interested in ownership, to the point where all contributors must agree to a license change or those contributions must be removed.
No, it's about profiting off of capital. Property is one form of capital, though I reject the idea that IP is valid, I don't believe anyone has an exclusive right to ideas. So my support of IP law in any form is purely pragmatic.
Basically, I derive rights from whatever could morally exist w/o a government w/o an initiation of force. In order for someone to take my real property, they would need to initiate force against me to deprive me of using it. In order for someone to use my intellectual property, they just need to see/hear it, and their use does not deprive me of using it, therefore no force.
So no, I reject the idea that IP has any moral foundation, it's merely a structure governments use to encourage sharing of IP. FOSS is a community-driven way of achieving the same thing, just without the period of exclusivity. So IP law is a corruption of capitalism, not a feature of capitalism.
Sure, but it wasn't inevitable. There are multiple ways to profit from a given class of product, and Reddit chose the one they thought would appeal to investors. I think that's short-sighted and probably an indication that /u/spez is looking for an exist, not to build a quality product.
So I left. Reddit no longer appealed to me as a user, so I found something that works better for me. I actually started building my own, but Lemmy was "good enough," so here I am. I'm still working on that project in my spare time, but not with the energy I once did. I don't want to run a SM app, I just want something that works reasonably well. I left Facebook for Reddit for the same reasons.
I agree, I just disagree that it applies to FOSS.
For example, many co-ops are leftist because the structure is all about spreading out the ownership of the organization among the workers. Perhaps the most relevant is an HOA, is owned by the residents of the community, who elect representatives to make decisions for the whole. A lot of right-wing people develop and live in areas with an HOA as evidenced by the way suburbs tend to vote. So I agree with the premise, I just disagree that it applies to FOSS.
I have no problem using leftist or right-wing structures, neither is a particularly dirty word, provided it's not a top-down structure. I reject authoritarianism, and I don't particularly care about which economic systems are used to solve problems (e.g. I think georgism has a lot of value for real property, socialism is great for certain types of orgs, and capitalism should be the way our markets work in general). FOSS doesn't really fall on that spectrum for me, it's just a way to structure a contract between individuals for mutual gain.
But it is. FOSS is free and open source software, not Capitalist owned IP. Simple as.
Capitalism is many things, but primarily is rent-seeking off of owning Capital. I used the term property instead of Capital because we are talking about IP, but it's nearly interchangeable.
You can't support Capitalism without being a statist. Capitalism requires a monopoly on violence to exist.
The fact that Capitalism ruined Reddit yet that could have been avoided does not mean it isn't the fault of Capitalism. That's like saying someone shooting someone else to desth isn't their fault, because the gun could have misfired.
Again, I really think you're misunderstanding FOSS as a concept being different from FOSS as used by people.
That's just not true. Capitalism is what happens when there is no force. Human nature is such that society would probably devolve into despotic states, but the economic system would likely still be capitalist.
Government prevents degrading into anarchy, and is a useful tool to prevent the worst of the bad outcomes (e.g. slavery, murder, etc).
You'll even see capitalism existing within authoritarian situations, like prison, dictatorships, etc. It's the default economic system people reach for.
But it does. Capitalism didn't cause /u/spez to choose ads over a subscription model, that was his free choice. There are multiple viable profit models, and he chose one that I didn't like.
Don't blame the economic system, blame the CEO.
And I think you're putting politics where it doesn't belong.
FOSS isn't inherently socialist, just like a tractor isn't. It's a tool, and it can be used to socialist and capitalist ends.
For example, the AGPL is frequently used to prevent competitors from effectively using a service, while also getting free contributions from the community. Those orgs often require signing over copyright for any contributions as well, so the work becomes the property of the company. At all points, the corporation has sole ownership of the source code. So who owns the "means of production" in this case? The corporation.
On the flipside, you have projects like Linux where contributors retain their own copyright and the software is essentially communally owned. So who owns the "means of production" in this case? The community as a whole.
It's not the license that's socialist, but the project management. FOSS is merely a grant to use, modify, and redistribute changes to a work owned by someone else. It's not a grant to share in ownership, otherwise you wouldn't have the limitations specified in the license.
Oh, you're genuinely one of those people.
No, Capitalism isn't what happens when there's no force, that's absurd. Capitalism requires a divide between Workers and Owners, which itself is forced hierarchy, and is upheld by a state. Government can be useful, yes, but Capitalism as an economic system is built on force.
You're also twisting the quote around its original meaning, "don't hate the player, hate the game," when it would've been more accurate to keep it as is. "Don't hate spez, hate Capitalism," as Capitalism is what created the conditions and incentives for spez to make money via making Reddit shit.
FOSS is a tool with expressed non-ownership and a rejection of taking profit. If a hammer was free for everyone to use and anyone could clone it, that would be a leftist hammer too.
You're trying really hard here, but given that you somehow think Capitalism is when you don't have force means you really do need to go back to the drawing board.
I am amazed by your patience with this obvious troll.
I doubt they're a troll, they have very common misconceptions.
They seem too articulate to be this genuinely dense. And the arguments are too perfectly dumb - it comes across as targeted satire.
But it doesn't, owners and workers can be the same individuals. I am a worker in my 9-5 job, and an owner through my retirement plan based on stocks. There's no class divide, just different roles.
Here's a decent definition of capitalism:
This is the common definition of capitalism as near as I can tell, and nowhere in there is a monopoly on force required.
Saying capitalism requires a state is like saying socialism requires a state. You can have socialism within capitalism unless the state forbids it (e.g. co-ops and other forms of worker owner orgs), and you can probably have limited capitalism within socialism if the state permits it. They're just different ways of producing goods, and both can exist without the state.
No, FOSS is a tool with expressed granting of rights, but not complete rights, to a work. If we restrict ourselves to "free software" (FOSS covers open source as well), you get the four freedoms: use, distribute, modify, and distribute modifications. That's it, you don't get full rights of ownership. Some FOSS licenses expand or reduce these freedoms, but we'll stick with the FSF definition for now.
But that only matters if there's a practical difference between ownership and non-ownership. With something like Linux, there are so many owners over various parts of the code that everyone practically has the same rights. However, with projects like MongoDB, all contributors sign over rights, so Mongo the company retains more rights than anyone else. You could call Linux "effectively socialist," whereas that's not true with Mongo.
FOSS explicitly doesn't reassign copyright (i.e. ownership), so it cannot be social ownership. It's individual ownership of parts of the means of a product and a grant of rights both for the product and (for copyleft licenses) future derivative works, so it's more like a publicly traded company (shareholders are the contributors) than a cooperative..
But my point here is that FOSS isn't an economic system, it's a license grant, so comparing it to socialism or capitalism misses the point entirely.
Those who own stock, but not enough to live off of, are Proletarian. Small business owners that must work are petite bourgeoisie, and large business owners that do not need to work are bourgeoisie. All of these are examples of Capitalist classes, the primary 2 being Proletarian and Bourgeoisie.
Capitalism requires a monopoly on force to exist, because Capitalism cannot exist without enforced property rights. A monopoly on force is the only way to, at scale, solidify absentee ownership of the products of another person's labor based on ownership of the tools.
FOSS is a rejection of such a system, and is leftist as such.
I thinking probably is that you're looking at everything through a Marxist lens. When all you have is a hammer...
Marx oversimplified things to make his point. In real world capitalism, there is no clean separation of classes, especially modern capitalism where everyone can by a part owner in something. I think he makes some good points, but I disagree with his conclusion that a worker led uprising is inevitable or even desired.
In my opinion, the main problem isn't with capital accumulation, but generational wealth. Capitalism generally rewards those whose labor makes a greater impact, but that doesn't hold if capital can just be given to someone who hasn't made such an impact. If we remove the reward, we remove a lot of the incentive to excel, relying only on internal motivations instead of external motivations.
But none of this is particularly relevant to FOSS, and that's kind of my point.
No, property rights can be protected through consensus instead.
Look at cryptocurrencies, there's no central authority enforcing your ownership of a certain amount of property, it's done through consensus. When we talk about proof of stake, it's absolutely a capitalistic system since you staking capital is how the system decides who processes the transaction. It's perhaps the purest form of capitalism that exists, and no force is needed to perpetuate it, even at scale.
To be clear, I'm not saying cryptocurrencies are good or bad (I don't want yet another rabbit hole discussion), just that they're an example of a capitalist system not requiring force to establish property rights.
But it's not. FOSS is just a way to share code in a way that requires users of the code to share their modifications with everyone if they share with anyone. That's it. It doesn't grant ownership and it doesn't limit owners.
Look at Richard Stallman, the man who came up with the GPL. He doesn't seem to be a socialist, and I have trouble placing him with any ideology. My guess is that he's some kind of green libertarian, he pushes progressive narratives, but mostly about ecological issues, justice (i.e. committing a crime in a corporation shouldn't protect you), etc. He's very opinionated on his website, but he doesn't really talk about political or economic structure, he just calls out stuff that seems bad to him. A lot of the free software community (the F part of FOSS) is pretty leftist/anarchist, while a lot of the open source community (the OS part of FOSS) is libertarian. But those views are generally separate from the licenses themselves.
Capitalist corporations use all kinds of agreements to cut costs and increase profits. Sometimes that's proprietary software owned solely by them, sometimes it's software that they work on with other corporations (I've had to sign NDAs when collaborating with other orgs), and sometimes it's FOSS (no NDA needed). Sometimes FOSS projects want copyright to be signed over (the FSF does, for example), sometimes they don't. I consider a copyright assignment to be against the spirit of FOSS since it benefits only the copyright holder (another reason I don't like Mongo), but whatever.
But again, all of this is irrelevant. It doesn't matter what political opinions Stallman, the FSF, or other FOSS communities hold, what matters are the principles FOSS is founded on.
Copyleft isn't even part of it, that's an FSF-specific thing (i.e. "Free Software").
You can run your project such that you don't accept input from anyone (definitely not socialist), or you can run it collaboratively where decisions are democratically agreed on (a bit more socialist?), or something in the middle. The licenses themselves aren't socialist, nor is the mindset that created them, they're merely the embodiment of the general principle of "it's good to share." Both capitalists and socialists agree with that (except maybe Objectivists like Ayn Rand, but that's another tangent).
Whether a project is socialist or capitalist depends on how it's run, not what license they use, the license is just a tool.
There weren't these simple, clean breaks in most classes in Marx's time either, which is why he spoke in aggregates.
Capitalism does not reward those whose labor makes a greater impact, it rewards those who own Capital. Capitalism doesn't care about how great the impact of labor is.
You can have a profit-motive within Socialism.
Property rights cannot be accepted without enforcement. If just one factory owner claims to own every chair produced, why would anyone accept that unless there was threat of violence?
FOSS is a rejection of ownership and profit, simple as.
It does reward those who make a greater impact. Entrepreneurs don't get rich if their use of capital doesn't have a far reaching impact.
Look at Elon Musk, he was able to use his capital to build compelling EVs and rockets, such that both became very popular products with far-reaching impact. Yes, he himself didn't build the EVs or the rockets, but his capital was necessary to fund development of those products. If he didn't invest in those products, we likely wouldn't have had such growth in those markets because he essentially created the demand for those products.
There are a ton of success stories that could be labeled "good" or "bad," but at the end of the day, they all have far-reaching impact through some mixture of capital and work that wouldn't have happened without both.
The problem with capitalism isn't capital itself, but how it's accumulated. My argument is that capital accumulated from entrepreneurship using capital generated by the individual is the system working at intended, and capital accumulated across generations is a corruption of that system. In other words, individual ownership is desired, inherited ownership is not.
Consensus is the alternative to centralized threat of force. Various anarchist constructions have ideas on how that could work.
I personally reject all anarchist constructions as fanciful, but there are extant systems that demonstrate that (e.g. cryptocurrencies).
No, FOSS is a rejection of restrictions.
Richard Stallman didn't create GNU and the GPL to "socialize the means of production," he did it because he was annoyed at not being able to modify software that you bought. He didn't particularly care who owned the software, only that he could modify it for his own personal use and share those modifications with others. He didn't want to own the original code, only his changes to that code to the extent that he could share his changes. In essence, he believed producers shouldn't be able to restrict their users through licenses, and this was largely a new thing under the Copyright Act of 1976 (i.e. "fair use" as a concept).
The whole intent was to preserve hacker culture, and is very similar to the Right to Repair movement for physical goods. Like the GPL, Right to Repair doesn't seek to change ownership rights to the product (i.e. you don't get a patent grant), it merely seeks to enable users to make modifications and repairs on their own without needing to go through the original vendor/manufacturer.
That said, FOSS attracts people from all over the political spectrum. Socialists like it because it looks like shared ownership (even though it's not), libertarians like it because it empowers the individual, capitalists like it because it's a way to share the cost of maintaining a common system (i.e. forcing competitors to share fixes), etc. But at the end of the day, it's not an economic system, it's not even a change in ownership, it's merely a license to share code. Don't make it more than it is.
Capitalism does not reward those who make a greater impact, it rewards ownership. Any reward of higher impact is immediately dispelled when you consider the massive impact of garbage men on society yet paltry pay.
FOSS is a rejection of individual ownership and of the profit motive, it is absolutely leftist.
Claiming something doesn't make it true.
We're going around in circles at this point, and I think I've made my point clearly. So I'll leave the discussion here.