I always like to think Free/Open source Software is the only known occurrnce where socialism works. You give 100% of what you have for free as a programmer, but in that very same moment you make everyone, including yourself, richer and more free. As software does not get consumed, everyone's assets rise.
Exactly this is capitalism at it's finest. Working on open source projects by itself has rewards :
1) you probably use it, so you use it yourself and your own situation gets better.
2) you get the efforts of others in addition to your own because of the open source nature (e.g. your code gets maintained, fixed, reviewed, ...)
3) There are plenty of companies (Google, FB, Red Hat, ...) that will give you a great job because of open source contributions you have made (and more general, reputational benefits)
FOSS projects have to start out private for someone to be able to make the decision to open source them in the first place. If everything belonged to the state, you might end up having a pretty hard time convincing the state to allow other states to fork/use it.
>I always like to think Free/Open source Software is the only known occurrnce where socialism works. You give 100% of what you have for free as a programmer, but in that very same moment you make everyone, including yourself, richer and more free
Moreso anarcho-socialism, because there is no state violence involved
Tikhon Jelvis, Lead Data Scientist at Target (2016-present) has a very good answer to "Is free software socialism?" at https://www.quora.com/Is-the-open-source-movement-socialism - I will quote the answer in its entirety for the benefit of this thread...
No. The two are not related in any useful or meaningful ways.
The first thing to note is that there are actually two core ways of thinking about open source software: the "open source" movement and the "free software" movement. While the two work together perfectly well—and most people probably share some of the views from both camps—they are philosophically distinct.
The open source movement is pragmatic at heart: the main idea is that developing software in the open leads to better software. More eyes and more diverse opinions on your codebase is a strength that often overshadows the commercial benefits of keeping software proprietary. This is the camp more often associated with more "permissive" licenses like MIT and BSD, and mirrors the philosophy I've seen at most companies that release and maintain significant open source projects (often based on their own internal tools).
This movement has no parallels to socialism whatsoever. It believes in open source collaboration as a strong model for software development but doesn't opine at all about property rights.
The free software movement, spearheaded by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Richard Stallman, is more ideological at heart. It originally started from the idea that you, as a consumer, have the right to understand and modify the software that runs on your machines. This is codified in the four freedoms that Free Software aims to protect:
* The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
* The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
These freedoms are often enacted with "copyleft" licenses like the GNU Public License (GPL). The idea is that you have the right to read, modify and distribute software under the GPL (including selling it commercially) as long as you distribute it under the same license. You can do more or less whatever you like as long as you provide all your users with the modified source to your software and give them the same rights.
The motivation behind the movement is to protect the rights that you have over your own devices and software, which is not significantly related to socialism at all. If anything, it's a way to strengthen what you can do with your own property!
There is one way you could see the Free Software movement in a way that parallels socialism: it's a collective effort and stands against "intellectual property".
However, this view misses some important details. Unlike socialism, Free Software is not concerned with property and how it is distributed in society; rather, it simply does not view "intellectual property" as property at all. In fact, many people in the movement don't regard "intellectual property" as property at all; instead, they view the term as a misleading way to group together several fundamentally unrelated laws into a single concept.
Richard Stallman wrote an interesting essay on this topic: Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It's a Seductive Mirage. His style is not for everyone—he comes off as very certain, almost fanatical, about his views—but it makes the idea eminently clear. The core idea is that copyrights, patents and trademarks are all fundamentally different from each other and fundamentally different from physical property; the term "intellectual property" is misleading because it groups these three disparate concerns together and implies they are variants on physical property.
There is nothing socialist about that view whatsoever. Trying to reform the laws and cultural norms around "intellectual property"—especially when you realize it's fundamentally distinct from other notions of property—is entirely orthogonal to socialism.
Both the Open Source and the Free Software movements are fundamentally unrelated to socialism.
I find your argument that OSS and FLOSS are "fundamentally unrelated to socialism" rather strange. So much so that I had to google definitions of socialism:
1)a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
2)(in Marxist theory) a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of communism.
Regarding OSS you wrote: "This movement has no parallels to socialism whatsoever. It believes in open source collaboration as a strong model for software development but doesn't opine at all about property rights." That seems to fit the part of definition 1 about means of production quite well. Actually I'm talking about design rather than the traditional means of production you might call replication.
As for Free Software, yes they are against the notion of intellectual property. But it is for pragmatic reasons actually. If you buy/obtain some software under traditional IP rules you are not allowed to modify it. That is in contrast to regular property laws - you can buy a car and modify it in all kinds of ways and resell it.
Where things get interesting is in the means of production in the traditional sense - producing copies. Software has the odd property that it can be replicated at nearly zero cost. In traditional industries from farming to manufacturing, production is a big deal and is where a lot of the costs are. You have resources and then you have utilization of those resources. People like to stake claims on either the resources, the means of production, or when that isn't enough, the design (IP) of the product. In contrast, communism want to take individual ownership of the resources and production away and claim it as community property. Free software also aims to strip that proprietary nature away from software and make it more of a community asset.
It may not be a perfect analogy, but to say it's fundamentally unrelated seems really strange to me.
The only known? I guess the problem is that "socialism" means a billion things to people, from "don't be so greedy all the time and help others out" to "specific governments Eastern Europe etc.". But I don't even buy that early Christians were the first example of that, I think exploitation is the invention, not socialism. Anyway, open source software is really just an example of this:
> If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson (13 Aug. 1813)
And if you look at the date you'll notice these thoughts are real old hats :P Doesn't take away from them of course, to the contrary... it's about time we actually implement the wisdom we have. But let's not think any of it is or should be new.
Because what we have now has no socialist elements? Last time I checked the US military was a pretty large part of the economy, and I would hardly class that as a purely capitalist endeavour.
The military shifts a whole lot of tax payer money to private corporations. And as Smedley Butler pointed out, without the impetus of private corporations there'd be a whole lot less war for the benefit of private corporations. From the taxpayer perspective, a bomb dropped into the middle of nowhere is just wasted money, a bomb dropped on people in a war of aggression is money wasted on murder. From the standpoint of the corporation the sold the bomb, both are highly profitable. And that's even before we get into the the spree of fucking countries to allow access to US corporations.
But the government sits in the middle, and the overall structure has some of the characteristics of a job creation scheme. What we have right now is in no way pure capitalism - it serves the interests of some people (left and right) to represent it as such.
