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Kaboom@reddthat.com 1 day agoThe 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.
Kaboom@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Communism in practice. Communism the theory is impossible. There’s conflicts in society, what happens if a worker doesn’t want to work in communism?
IBM was doing open source in 1952, 23 years before Microsoft was founded. You should really do some background research. To get you started, …wikipedia.org/…/History_of_free_and_open-source_…
cabb@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Since you didn’t disagree, it sounds like we both agree that the FOSS movement is compatible with communist ideals.
Only the theory impacts the founding of the FOSS movement so communism in practice is irrelevant.
I’ve been talking about the FOSS movement this entire time, which dates to 1983. IBM only started interacting with the modern FOSS movement in a significant way in the 90s per www.ibm.com/opensource/story/
wintermute_oregon@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Foss is neither communist nor capitalist. It’s just a way to distribute software. If anything it’s capitalist since to survive they sell support and other things. It’s just one model of many. If you look it’s mainly for profit companies investing in it. Look at the top contributors for many projects and they are for profit companies donating to the project.