this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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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.