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

The idea of free software is extremely socialist/communist. People working together to create something that anyone can use for free, with profit being a non-existent or at least minor motivator.

Please stop posting good reasons to use Linux, I already feel bad enough for the poor people stuck in Win$ and MacO$

Relevant Section under Gift economies:

The expansion of the Internet has witnessed a resurgence of the gift economy, especially in the technology sector. Engineers, scientists, and software developers create open-source software projects. The Linux kernel and the GNU operating system are prototypical examples of the gift economy's prominence in the technology sector and its active role in using permissive free software and copyleft licenses, which allow free reuse of software and knowledge.

Essentially the line of thought is that open source software is an example of mutual aid and the gift economy.

I thought it was an autonomous collective.

Also, Linus is a "woke communist"

https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWSXomDbvdxKgOxVAm

Isn't it a benevolent dictatorship with Linus at the head?

Cory Doctorow has a book, "Walkaway" that is basically exploring the politics of FOSS on a societal scale. It's pretty nerdy obv but I enjoyed it and it doesn't overly glamourize any political system the way you'd typically see in political fiction.

sudo apt install anarchism is a real command in Debian.

Idk, technically voluntary association is a key tenet of volunteerism/anarcho-capitalism, so if we're just using volunteering as the basis we might as well say it's volunteerism. I think anarcho-communism and anarcho-capitalism are a bit more nuanced than "sharing."

I mean...yeah

Interesting assertion, but is it really?

The Linux kernel is a single software product produced by a single entity and ultimately controlled by a small cadre of highly trusted people.

What's the real difference between an "anarchist communist" and a "communist"? The first one can have "personal property" while the second cant? So... an anarchist communist can own a car but not a house? According to the internet "personal property" is everything that can be moved (not real estate) and isn't considered for production of something...

And I think Lemmy is also an example of ancom due to the fediverse and the self-hosting aspect 🤔

And the FOSS system seems to be collapsing right now for the same reason that anarcho-communism only works short-term until someone sees commercial value in it and abuses the system to the limit.

Big corporations initially providing exceptional services based on FOSS and after a while use their market share to excert undue control about the system (see e.g. RedHat, Ubuntu, Chrome, Android, ...)
Big corporations taking FLOSS, rebranding it and hiding it below their frontend, so that nobody can interact with or directly use the FLOSS part (e.g. iOS, any car manufacturer, ...)
Big and small companies just using GPL (or similar) software and not sharing their modifications when asked (e.g. basically any embedded systems, many Android manufacturers, RedHat, ...)
Big corporations using infrastructure FOSS without giving anything back (e.g. OpenSSL, which before Heartbleed was developed and maintained by a single guy with barely enough funding to stay alive, while it was used by millions of projects with a combined user base of billions of users)

The old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook is everywhere.

And so it's no surprise that many well-known FOSS developers are advocating for some kind of post-FOSS system that forces commercial users to pay for their usage of the software.

Considering how borderline impossible it is for some software developer to successfully sue a company to comply with GPL, I can't really see such a post-FOSS system work well.