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Kaboom@reddthat.com 2 days agoIt’s worse than reddit. The devs themselves are unironically communists. I’m not joking or exaggerating, they actually called themselves communists. lemmy.ml/post/55143
I like the software and the libertarian bent, but my god the politics here are trash and very one-note outside of this sub.
redut_nl@lemmy.libertarianfellowship.org 2 days ago
Wow - that is pretty extreme. That doesn’t totally surprise me though - FOSS is also very leftwing and it seems to apply to most of the tech communities. Not sure why - maybe they see the whole world as an huge algorithm and that inequality is a bug that can an must be fixed (top down approach). Unfortunately the world isn’t predictable and human nature isn’t compatible with communism and only societies that thrive due to capitalism can absorb some socialism. I don’t know any poor society that used socialism to get itself out of poverty. It is always capitalism that does the trick.
cabb@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
FOSS has a lot of leftwing advocates because it distributes the means of (software) production. The initial idea was inspired by Communism. Lemmy has a lot of FOSS people in the tech communities so you see the spillover there. You’re possibly more used to seeing the Silicon Valley type of tech people who are right wing if not anarchnocapitalists.
redut_nl@lemmy.libertarianfellowship.org 2 days ago
I’ve been a GNU/Linux user for decades. I know RMS but I don’t think he is or ever was a communist. He isn’t against capitalism and is fine with people making money of free software. He stepped out of FOSS and I haven’t followed what’s currently going on though. Most tech I find interesting is decentralized, private and open source. You might be right that on the closed software side they are more right wing.
Lemmy is nice. Software itself doesn’t have a political view and it doesn’t seem to care who is using it 😊
Kaboom@reddthat.com 2 days ago
The initial idea was because companies distributed the source code along with the machine code because machine code didn’t work across diverse machines. People would modify the source code to add features and send it back to the original company who would then add it in.
It was a capitalist thing, it was all voluntary. Communism is all about forcing people.
Unless you think IBM is communist.
cabb@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I see your confusion, I just said FOSS and I should have said FOSS movement to be more clear. Double-checking myself shows that the FOSS orgs tend to be apolitical, so I should have instead said compatible with communist views.
You state that communism is all about forcing people, however communism is defined as a stateless classless society. How would you force people in such a situation?
IBM is most certainly capitalist, they just realized they could benefit from open source software once they fell behind MS. Being able to share development costs is still beneficial in a capitalist economy, even if you don’t privately own the end product. Just like how sharing the cost of healthcare can be beneficial for the social welfare.