Anyone can fork it and do what they want, people respect Linus and follow suit because he’s good at what he does and knows it best. He holds no power or authority beyond the willful respect and acknowledgement of the people.
Neither, the title specifically states Anarcho-Communism, not Marxism-Leninism. Closest analog would be any other AnCom that created a large publicly available service.
Amazing how every single part of your comment is so wrong.
It’s actually a really good analogy,
Not an analogy, an example. Those two are different things.
because it can only run on
No, it can run on many things, including open source collaborative hardware that exists.
fully-capitalist hardware.
What the hell even is that? Fun fact: until very recently most of the computer hardware was made in communist China. I know, scary. And now that a lot of effort is being made to get that production out of there, those efforts are being sponsored by public money to an incredible degree. Billions of dollars of taxes (you know, community resources) are being poured into that because big corporations are the biggest lovers of government handouts.
Only RISC-V spec is open. Hardware is still proprietary and is using proprietary cores manufactured using proprietary tech processes. 1% open source in the product doesn’t make the product fully open source.
Case in point. You think quoting an argument and sneering is a counterargument. Obviously, because you don’t know the first thing about labor theory of value.
Someone asked if you think capitalists or engineers did the engineering, and you revealed you don’t understand the question.
You are once again building a flawed model of the dynamic at play here in an attempt to ease the discomfort you feel from encountering something that doesn’t make sense to you (why did I choose to join this community?). I’m not even attempting to build any counterarguments because the responses I’ve gotten don’t even attempt to understand what I’ve said in the beginning. To be utterly frank I just lack respect for people who think of themselves as any flavour of anarchist while still dreaming of a system as thoroughly rigid as the artificially created Internet. You pretend to hate the system while desperately trying to invent excuses for continuing to make yourself at home within it.
No dude, you demonstrably said ‘I’m going to repeat your argument so you can think about it.’ Projecting some emotional state onto me is not gonna change how you fucked this up.
This is mockery. I am calling you ignorant.
I am trying to highlight how you joined an explicitly leftist server, whilst remaining aggressively unaware of… genuinely the first things people learn about leftism. So when you try smugly posturing your way out of a pointed question, you’re just revealing you know less than nothing.
To be utterly frank I just lack respect for people who think of themselves as any flavour of anarchist while still dreaming of a system as thoroughly rigid as the artificially created Internet.
Anarchists being naked hippies, of course, not organized laborers. The internet was mostly designed and operated by academics. It runs on half a century of “does this sound right?” collaborative standards. Whatever browser you’re reading this in has its origins in anti-monopolist diehards building better software out of spite.
None of which is even addressing the initial failure. Capital didn’t design your computer. Intel’s founders definitely did, but only because they were workers dissatisfied under Fairchild, who were in turn workers dissatisfied under Shockley. The early history of silicon valley is halfway to semiconductor co-ops.
Well you solved that conundrum rightly. Now let’s go linch those dirty Apple and John Deere engineers. Since they’ve designed those machines, they must be the only responsible parties for designing them with their extreme anti-consumer and anti-repair policies. They must get commissions on every licensed repair or something, it’s definitely got nothing to do with capitalists putting restrictions on the design team in order to increase profits, nope…
You’re completely off on what I’m getting at. The idea of “Capitalist” hardware, as though the Capitalist did the labor, is wrong. Engineers are paid for their labor power, they don’t typically get royalties or anything of the sort, just like any other laborer.
Someone saying that FOSS software relies on Capitalist hardware is putting the Capitalist over the Engineer, as though the Capitalist created the hardware, and not the labor of the miners, assemblers, designers, engineers, and so forth, regardless of who owns the Capital the labor is done by the Workers. FOSS is agnostic to whoever owned the Means of Proruction of the hardware using or producing it.
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.
I have some newfound respect for the man, it seems. Not that I didn’t respect him earlier, just thought that his toxicity was the defining trait of his temper. I find these takes somehow mellow the image in my mind.
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).
Linus isn’t a tankie, and Socialism/Communism isn’t giving away money. It’s a dramatic restructuring of the economy into a Worker owned and operated one.
Depends on what exactly you mean by Socialism, but by the definitions of Socialists, no not really. Socialism is Worker Ownership of the Means of Production, plain and simple. Communism is a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society, post-Socialist. Marxist-Leninists occasionally call the transition to Communism Socialism, and as such an overall Socialist system could have Capitalism within using those terms, but other forms of Socialism such as Anarcho-Syndicalism have full worker ownership of the Means of Production without being Communist.
You’d have to define what you mean by Socialism, because I disagree, a fully Socialist economy is just as worker owned as a fully Communist economy.
I've never seen any kind of authoritative definition between little s and big S socialism, so if you are intending to draw a distinction based on capitalization alone, I consider that to be a semantic game. I believe there is no such distinction. I understand socialism to involve public (i.e. government) control of production, and inherently more authoritarian than true communism. In that sense, I see 20th century communist nations as more socialistic in implementation because of their emphasis on state control.
In short, socialism is just a kind of authoritarianism that pretends to be beneficent, while communism is more of a person-to-person, bottom-up ideology. On the topic of this thread, I can see how Linux and more broadly the FLOSS movement are communistic, but I see them as only marginally socialistic, at most.
I’m not making any distinction. Socialism is socialism, capitalization or not, and the common definition is plainly Worker Ownership of the Means of Production. Whether done a la Market Socialism, where worker Co-ops form the economy, or democratic Socialism where there is liberal democracy that owns industry, or Marxism, Syndicalism, etc, this doesn’t change.
What is causing you to believe Socialism is authoritarian? If production is owned collectively, rather than by mini-dictators a la Capitalism, how is this more authoritarian?
As for 20th century Socialist countries controlled by Communist parties, such as the USSR or Maoist China, no leftist believes them to have been Communism, even themselves. They were Marxist-Leninist states attempting to build Communism via Socialism, in their own words. Some leftists call them red-fascist, or State Capitalist, but every leftist agrees that they had not achieved Communism.
Following the previous discussion, FLOSS is both Communist and Socialist. All Communism is Socialist, as all Communism is focused on Worker Ownership of the Means of Production, however not all Socialism is Communist.
I can't think of a government that would truly treat the industries it controls as "worker owned". The workers would merely be employees of the government.
Edit 2: Linus is worth 150M+, not exactly giving that away either.
Given the magnitude of his contribution, he could be a multi-billionaire, calling loudly for cage fights for his wife to beat up Zuckerberg and Musk. Then again, Linux probably wouldn’t have been as successful if he had gone that route.
I think it’s safe to say though that he’s no communist or probably not even center-left in the economic sense. I mean he did deliberately and permanently relocate to USA from Finland in the 90s. Also his father is a Swedish People’s Party politician, and that party is the best kind: classic liberal.
That’s fair, but the result seems to be the same; he’s nowhere near as caustic when interacting with people as he used to be. I had quite a lot of sympathy with the message in most of his technical rants, but the delivery was counterproductive. If he’s changed that I think he’s done well.
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.
There’s a book called Opt-Out from Rory Price about a future where humanity starts using AR more and more to the point that it’s almost obligatory to have a device of this kind for everything, even as ID. It then talks about a group that develops a free/libre version of this device’s OS and they have to decide about personal issues or try to maintain their views. It’s entertaining and not too long, but I think it shows a very possible future.
I haven’t heard from its author in some time, but I think they discovered they were someone else too ;), that’s why I love this book.
I almost did myself, but then I looked up the term,and I realized that Linux is exactly that. For me, it’s because I thought I knew what the term meant. I thought that it advocated for state owned software, because communism is all about state controlled property.
en.wikipedia.org
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