TIL that operating system Linux is an example of anarcho-communism

I was leftie before I was techie. If you don't know anything around tech and computers you wouldn't know what to do. Even as a fairly tech-adjacent professional it took me quite a while.

Then again, I only became a real leftie again after kicking all the corpos out of my computer.

Tech used to be (and still is) obscured by heavy gatekeeping. We who understand a little more like to joke about those who don't, and I guess we'll have to stop that if we really want to unite the left. Don't ridicule, explain. The person might never have had a chance to learn the concept.

It’s pretty hard to fight hegemony when your salary is just built on donations. A lot of important tech is also paid for via government grants then the private sector gets to use it and erect the walled gardens when it should be in the commons.

As a linux leftie, I fully agree. It’s hard to convince people though. Also, I don’t necessarily think it’s the best intro to leftism for layfolk. It’s a great into to leftism for tech nerds and a great intro to tech for left nerds, but the punk who just uses the library computer doesn’t care. Unions are often the easiest intro to leftism for people and not many union folks are interested in learning free software.

I was out drinking the other day and an IBCW friend introduced me to a union brother of his and they’re smart guys who believe in the power of labor, hell they even excitedly showed me that there’s a professionals union in the AFL-CIO, but if I tried to explain a terminal to them they’d look at me like I grew several heads at once.

Free software is great praxis, but it often suffers by the fact that it isn’t what people are used to. That there are intro free softwares like GIMP, libreoffice, and basically anything where FOSS is the default. We can do this, but I think it’s definitely going to not be the easiest sell.

It's really too bad the original innovators got subsumed by capitalist 'tech bros.'

I'm sure they wouldn't collect personal data for nefarious purposes.. Or abuse what they collect 🤔

Big tech that is...

Yes, open source software often requires funding and corporate support because we live in a primarily capitalist society. That doesn't make it capitalist itself.

And I think the freedom foss offers is socialist - it necessitates cooperation, it's open for all to see and contribute to, and the idea of ownership is very loose. It doesn't matter what the political motivation is.

Capitalism just means stuff can be >privately owned

This is the antithesis of free software. FOSS can not be owned. Patents and copyright are essential to capitalism. You are not allowed to copy and redistribute Adobe Photoshop, nor the music of your favorite band, movies, books, etc etc

Free software subverts some of the rent seeking barriers put in place by capitalists (copyright and patents, both are enforced by government). I agree that a real free market wouldn't have those things, but capitalists don't want a free market, they want to capture the market and extract as much profit out of it for the least amount of effort.

That phrase that you said has absolutely nothing to do with the Linux/Libre philosophy.

You take care of your self and scratch your own itch

While I understand that you meant to make an analogy with people creating the projects they want to use, the vast majority of people don't create their projects, and instead contribute to others, and they contribute with existing issues not necessarily things that they want or need. Alternatively you can see that a lot of issues are fixed by people who are not affected by it, it's very common for issues to ask people to test specific changes to see if they solved the issue they were facing.

and you should not be a liability to the society

The vast majority of people just use the software that the community maintains, and when they need a feature they open a PR and let the community implement it. So the vast majority of people are a liability to the community, even if you contribute to one project actively you use several others that you've never contributed to.

but make your self useful and contribute back.

This has nothing to do with right-wing philosophy, in fact most right wing people are against any form of contribution,

And I think this is kind of the reason FLOSS works well, it can be aligned with many philosophies.

You might not like it, but FLOSS is extremely aligned with left wing ideology, where people contribute to the community because they want to and the community provides back without asking anything in return.

Eric S Raymond (ESR) is the originator of the philosophy you're espousing. He's a Right-Libertarian who has made a lot of contributions to and arguments about FOSS, but in this case i think he's pretty much wrong. He was a big proponent of the BSD license and opponent of the GPL because, in his view, the GPL interfered with economic activity while BSD was more compatible with it.

ESR's belief was that open source software was not threatened by capitalism and that it would thrive even if large companies used it, while the other side of the argument was that it would languish if all of the large users were corporations who did not (voluntarily) contribute back. In contrast, with GPL (and similar mandatory open licenses): the corporations would be required to contribute back and thus whether the usage was corporate or not the project would benefit and grow either way.

That was a while ago, though. I think we can see, now, that while the BSDs are great (and have many of their own technological advantages over Linux based OSes) and they are being used by corporations, that has not resulted in the kind of explosive growth we've seen with GPL software. Gross tech bros love to use both BSD-style and GPL-style code, but with GPL they're required to contribute back. That attracts developers, too, who don't want to see their work end up as the foundation of some new Apple product with nothing else to show for it.

So we now can pretty much call it, i think, barring new developments: the Communist (and Left-Libertarian and Anarchist) approach "won" and the Right-Libertarian approach didn't actually pan out. GPLed software is running servers and all kinds of things even though, technically speaking, BSD was probably a better choice up until recently (until modern containerization, probably) and still has a lot going for it. The Right-Libertarian philosophy on this is a dead end.

You didn't write the kernel, write the libraries, or write the user space applications, did you? No, Linux is the product of a collaborative group of strangers working towards the same goal, a goal that largely doesn't include any considerations for profit. You haven't pulled yourself up by your boot straps to make Linux. Hell, even Linus didn't do that. It's the product of thousands of people working on it over decades. It's not capitalist, it's not individualistic, Linux is communal.

If you believe, for a particular issue, that people should work together to create something that anyone can use for free, then for that particular issue you do have a socialist ideology. That's the definition of a socialist policy, other examples of this are public education, public health care, or Universal Basic Income. You might disagree with healthcare being public, but agree that education should be, people are not entirely socialist or capitalist, each issue can have a different answer.

People, especially those in the US and Brazil, need to stop thinking communism/socialism are bad terms and look at them for what they really are and analyse the specific issue at hand.

Or just think for yourself and have your own opinions about issues instead of signing up for an entire ideology.

Whenever people talk about how difficult Linux is to install i ask them if they've installed Windows lately. They all say "yes". I do not believe a word of it, though. If they had done so--or more likely, tried to do so--there's no way they'd have that opinion. I'm sure they've gone into their OEM's recovery menu and hit "reinstall" or whatever, but that's a very different process.

I've tried switching to Linux exclusively multiple times, and I always end up falling back to Windows on my desktop. I have multiple Linux servers and VMs, but there are two main barriers. First is gaming. Last time I tried, I couldn't get RTX working in some titles, EA launcher was broken, and it was generally just buggy. The second reason is for coding. I've been coding for Windows for almost 20 years, and I am hugely reliant on Visual Studio. I just can't find a comparable alternative for Linux.

I'd ditch Windows in a second if I could make Linux work for me, but so far I haven't had much luck.

I had to run a hidden script at a specific point during the install to allow me to not have to use a Microsoft account

No, all you had to do was leave the PC disconnected from the internet during the install.

I had to install a 3rd party Nvidia driver update tool because their official one requires making an account and gives a bunch of unwanted ads as notifications.

The nVidia driver, direct from nVidia, certainly does not require an account. Only need an account if you plan on using GeForce Experience.

For the Microsoft account during install you can just type: [email protected] as username and a as password, then submit. It'll then tell you this account is blocked or doesn't work and allows you to create a local account instead.

The setup is so bloated.

Hey, why get rid of valueable computing devices 😃 there is nothing more fun than a rolling distro like arch pr openSuse tumbleweed on old apple hardware

😁 i live a free computing live where I collect trash (mostly from my father and thus apple devices) and install Linux on them to make them treasures

I love it because I hate eWaste

Damn, still hovering around negative two thousand? You can do it! Don't let people get you down by ignoring your trolls. You are a troll, you are beautiful, and your contrarianism is annoying af! Don't ever let anyone tell you different. I'm sorry people aren't downvoting you at a rate high enough to smash that goal. You will get there.

Imagine paying for Windows. What a waste of money.

Bro it's cool if your needs are best served by Windows or OS X but please don't lump me along with childish ideologues like OP. I've switched to Linux on my work Desktop about seven years ago, yet that didn't make me feel the need to go full-communist about it, nor do I hold it up as some kind of free market success story.

Supreme executive power derives from using sudo, not some farcical user account control.

I mean, if I went 'round saying I was a sysadmin just because some angry Finn lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away

Oh, Robert, there's some lovely filth over here...

The man is a swedish speaking Finn originally, it kinda comes with the territory. We might technically be a minority but we're still as Finnish as the rest of them (to a certain degree at least).

I think even he realized his tocicity was a problem a few years ago, so he took time out to work on that and seems much more balanced now.

If you're a tankie you can be a cunt? What an absurd take.

Edit: tankie is originally too strong for Linus. Still a terrible takeaway.

Edit 2: Linus is worth 150M+, not exactly giving that away either.

Problem is that the average person cannot discern between an actual expert and a charlatan.

I would disagree and say it's more akin to a philosopher king hence less anarchy and more monarchy. It's all good until the king dies and let's see who succeeds them.

It will be most telling when Linus dies.

How often does forking actually work in the real world? Pretty much never.

anarchism would be my guess.

mostly used to imagine neofeudalism

what else is it used for?

Yes and they'd argue that anarchism isn't exclusively leftist (well, I'D argue that depends on one's definition of left/right, because depending on who you ask it's either good/bad, collectivism/individualism, or lib/auth, and by the latter definition they would then be leftist capitalists, which is funny to think about.) They support individual ownership without rulers, however they still promote sharing of things you own with your community if you can/want.

Right, and just because sharing is "allowed" in communism doesn't mean sharing is communism. It being allowed in both not being necessarily representative of either is my whole point.

Exactly, although I'm not sure there are a lot of Communist governments in the world and the ones that do exist stabilize themselves by suppressing information and journalism.

Is that why there were so many darn anarchists there?

And yeah books to prisoners programs are both a means of direct action and of spreading anti carceral propaganda to those most effected. Not all programs are anarchist, but the one I helped with had a zine library that included a lot of stuff by former prisoners about the harm, ineffectiveness, and racist origins of the American prison system. Which was good because at least that was something they always had enough of unlike English-Spanish dictionaries. Seriously if you ever have any lying around donate it to a books for prisoners program. A lot of prisoners want to learn to communicate with those they’re locked in a cage with. And for anyone with more liberal sensibilities it’s also a form of self improvement that helps on the outside.

Fun fact: until very recently most of the computer hardware was made in communist China. I know, scary.

China hasn't been communist in a long time.

No, it can run on many things, including open source collaborative hardware that exists

Please explain to me where this "open source collaborative" Internet hardware is on which you run your bitcoin network.

Same sort of deal as "anarcho-communist" operating systems. @@