Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)
Linux and open source in general completely blow apart capitalist arguments that profit motive is necessary for innovation and technological advancement. Open source ecosystem primarily run by volunteers has produces some of the most interesting and innovative technologies that we’ve seen. The reality is that people make interesting things because they’re curious and they enjoy making stuff. Pretty much nobody makes anything interesting with profit being the primary motive.
Also without open source the capitalist tech sector would collapse
It wouldn’t necessarily collapse (it wasn’t exactly suffering before FOSS stuff “hit the shelves”, so to speak) but the gatekeeping that comes with it would certainly cause a tremendous amount of stagnation
I work in software development. Almost all modern architecture would collapse without the open source ecosystem.
Isnt every important server run on linux?
Half the user-facing internet broke for a few hours when one guy withdrew a shitty one-liner piece of JavaScript (the whole leftpad thing) because someone somewhere added it as a dependency to a dependency to a dependency until it was pulled into an enormous frontend library. The internet relies more on random open source contributions than a lot of people are aware of.
capitalist arguments that profit motive is necessary for innovation and technological advancement
I don’t know who is arguing this because it’s incredibly stupid. The greatest scientific minds of history, the mathematicians, the physicists, the inventors, were not capitalists, they’re people with passion for their work.
If we move to a society that guarantees basic human needs and good education, we’re only going to have more scientists and engineers that progress technology even faster.
And while we are at it… novelists, poets, painters, musicians, philosophers, …
Tragically, however, it may spell the end of the sandwich artist.
Capitalists argue this because it gives them the appearance of a moral high ground.
Enshittification shows how untrue this - capitalism by its very nature will always devolve into worse and worse offerings because it’s reliant on squeezing out ever more profit.
Capitalism will only ever puh out the bare minimum of technological advancement. And keeping people in indentured labour (aka employees) to the capitalist system so that they either have no time to come up with innovations themselves or they own the intellectual property of any indentured workers means that the overwhelming majority of innovation is monopolised by capitalism too. Which also contributes to the appearance of pushing advancement.
The innovation argument is shaky at best many of the corporations innovations are brought or copied really. Is a story that became pretty common in the latest decades one guy come with a good idea some other mofo takes it and profits with it.
That’s why it’s important to use hard copyleft licenses like the GPLv3 instead of merely open-source MIT or BSD licenses wherever possible when you publish software.
Indeed, the corps did a whole campaign lobbying for permissive licenses precisely so they could plunder open source work. Hard copyleft should be used for any serious project.
Preach brother!
What’s more is that corporate driven research is necessarily biased towards whatever is profitable which is often at odds with what’s socially useful. For example, it’s more profitable to research drugs that help maintain disease and can be sold over a long time than drugs that cure it. Profit motive here ends up being completely at odds with what’s beneficial for people who get sick.
And of course, any research that doesn’t have a clear path towards monetization isn’t going to be pursued. This is precisely why pretty much all fundamental research comes out of the public sector.
This is true to some extent, but the best, most successful open source software is nowadays to a large extent made by for-profit businesses developing it for their own use but sharing it with the world.
There is a strong correlation between “is this kind of software mainly used by businesses vs. individuals” and “does this kind of software tend to be open source”. Hardly anyone uses proprietary version control or web server software anymore. But (other extreme) in the area of video games, nearly all of them are still proprietary and probably will be for a long time. Software such as web browsers or office suites sits somewhere in between, both kinds exist there.
Biggest and most popular projects are attractive to companies as well as individuals for the same reasons. However, the original point was that companies are not needed for open source to exist or for innovation to happen.
Linux and open source in general completely blow apart capitalist arguments that profit motive
Wrong! Linux and open source only shows that the profit motive is not the only motive. One should broaden the definition of profit to encompass value in all its forms. ie A person can gain value from the satisfaction of DIY as it can be self-empowering. One can gain emotional value from sharing. It also invokes the law of reciprocation - value exchange but without a $ sign. The Open source ecosystem is also heavily funded by business who relies on open source components. It is a capital investment.
The profit motive as used in capitalist sense strictly refers to financial gain. My whole point was that people do open source development for broader reasons than just base financial gain.
And while companies do some funding, the ecosystem can exist without them perfectly fine.
If the profit motive is not the only motive that drives innovation, as you just agreed, then it isn’t necessary, logically. And not sure why you would then go on to expand the definition of profit into meaninglessness after agreeing there are other motives.
What? How the f do you transition from ‘not only’ to ‘isn’t necessary’? That is not logic - that is mental gymnastics with a triple back flip! Profit is the PRIMARY motivator! People wish to move away from discomfort more than anything else. Currency is the best way of alleviating discomfort!
- If X is a necessary motive for Y, then in the absence of X, Y cannot happen.
- Innovation can happen in the absence of a profit motive.
- Therefore, the profit motive is not necessary for innovation.
People can grow food in the absence of technology - but subsistence living is a hell of time!
nb. Marxists still have no answer for the calculation problem.
So I guess you agree that the profit motive isn’t necessary, because you moved to a completely unrelated point
So I guess you cannot process anything other than black/white logical fallacies let alone analogies.
I disagree somewhat.
A lot of high tech development comes with a greed motive, e.g. IPO, or getting bought out by a large company seeking to enter the space, e.g. Google buying Android, or Facebook buying Instagram and Oculus.
And conversely, a lot of open source software are copies of commercially successful products, albeit they only become widely adopted after the originals have entered the enshittified phase of their life.
Is there a Lemmy without Reddit? Is there a Mastodon without Twitter? Is there LibreOffice without Microsoft Office and decades of commercial word processors and spreadsheets before that? Or OpenOffice becoming enshittified for that matter? Is there qBittorrent without uTorrent enshittified? Is there postgreSQL without IBM’s DB2?
The exception that I can see is social media and networked services that require active network and server resources, like Facebook YouTube, or even Dropbox and Evernote.
Okay, The WELL is still around and is arguably the granddaddy of all online services, and has avoided enshittification, but it isn’t really open source.
The idea that these things wouldn’t exist without commercial analogs is silly. You do realize that things like BBS boards and IRC existed long before commercial social media platforms right? In fact, we might’ve seen things like social media evolve in completely different directions if not for commercial platforms setting standards based on attracting clicks, and monetizing users.
all the for profit things we use are worse because they are for profit.
most of the time a site or service UI is made worse it’s because AB testing found the worse UI wastes user’s time and the metrics read that as engagement.
Exactly, most of the bloat on commercial sites isn’t there for the benefit of the user, but rather in order to monetize them. It’s ads, trackers, metrics, and all the other garbage that you don’t actually want.
This is so wrong. It’s not volunteers writing this code it is people employed by companies who are paid to write this code. You do know people have to eat.
Open source has existed long before companies started getting involved with it. Meanwhile, people having to eat has nothing to do with the argument being made which is that capitalism and profit motive are not required for creativity and technological progress.
Wait. So where are my FOSS-bucks?
I was feeling the last part had some more story behind it so I went ahead and found this:
Seems like I’m a full-blown woke communist too
Doesn’t read like he’s an actual communist, more insulting people (rightly so) that would call liberals communists.
Nvm
er… did torvalds just say trans rights? based alert
I think he said trans rights in the wording that >90% of people would agree with.
God I wish that were true but there are a LOT of people (well, conservatives) who are vehemently against wider society allowing cross dressing or medical transition. It's not 90% :(
It’s strange to me that any of the things he said is controversial.
I don’t think it’s that controversial unless you’re hardcore conservative. Realistically he just laid out the view of most of the Libertarian party. Nothing he said denotes woke or communist except for the part or him claiming to be one. I’d like to see the full context, because that woke communist comment probably wasn’t directed at Linus’ views
The communist part reads as sarcasm because he was accused of being one
I’m definitely woke af. And proud of it.
I have come to think that when profits are at odds with health, happiness, the good of society and humanity, then either a non profit foundation needs to be running it or it needs to be in the hands of the government—but a much less corrupt one. And I believe oligopolies need to be broken up and anti trust laws greatly expanded and enforced. Then we can deal with the oligopoly / plutocracy. We set a maximum wage (including all earnings) and tax 100% above that. Penalties for regulatory breaches include jail time. For corporations. With corporations reigned in, oligopolies and oligarchies crumbled, we can prevent regulatory capture and corruption. Campaign finance is abolished and it is paid for out of public funds. We abolish first past the post voting in favor of scientifically determined better alternatives to ensure voters actually have a variety of choices.
Idk wtf that makes me except maybe a ranting lunatic lol
In my mind, "woke" has two meanings that apply to this context:
- positive: aware of the hardships different groups of people might face
- negative: overboard political correctness, cancel culture
It's entirely possible to be pro-woke and anti-woke at the same time because of this.
As a full fledged Ancapper, I respect your opinion
Common sense on the internet in this economy 😮
Where do I sign up for my Atheist card?
Just when I thought I couldn’t admire him more…
In German we call it “Links Grün vesifft”
Aber die Grüneeeeeeeeennnnnn!!!
I personally think communism especially Marxism sounds really good on paper. The problem is that just about every time it has been attempted things didn’t really seem to work like they are supposed to.
Its like every state that attempts communism just ends up being a perpetual Vanguard state, and it ends up being authoritarian and terrible.
I really think there are several good ideas in Marx theories, but the actual implementation of those theories needs some work to figure out how they should be incorporated without being corrupted and overtaken by tyrants.
You’re right. Communism is like the greatest social form a society can possibly achieve. The Problem is, that humans are dumb and will always try to get the best out of it for themselves so the concept of communism is ruined by those people. It maybe is practicable in small “society’s” (your family as example) but fails in big societies like states.
I personally think communism especially Marxism sounds really good on paper. The problem is that just about every time it has been attempted things didn’t really seem to work like they are supposed to.
Boy, that’s the understatement of the century. Not only did it not work, it often results in mass murder and the ushering in of a totalitarian regime.
Capitalism didn’t appear over night. It took several attempts and iterations to get it anywhere near what it is today. Most modern theories on the implementation of Marxism focus less on centralized government authority and more on democracy in the work place, and eliminating 3rd party shareholders’ control. Much of the struggle with implementation of this, is that the existing financial structures aren’t set up to handle this type of thing well.
What we have today isn’t really even capitalism anymore. It is becoming something else. We don’t have free markets, for example, because large corporate players are not allowed to fail. Under a central banking system, the state can simply print money to fund its corporate protectorates while artificially suppressing interest rates to avoid paying any interest on the debt. And then we use tariffs and policy to pick and choose winners, suppressing competition. This is about as far from capitalism as one can imagine.
Can you point me to a time when capitalism did happen? Where governments and outside forces weren’t picking winners and losers in the market? In such a time what was the plight of the common worker? Did we see overwork, workplace safety, and child labor issues?
Third wave communism doesn’t seek to abandon the “free market” (which is free within bounds), it instead favors democracy in the workplace. Where all members of the organization are employee-owners including ceos and middle management and the “Board” is dissolved into either a representative or direct democracy made up of employee-owners. In this way one increases the incentives for each individual to perform and see the company perform well. This also mitigates much income inequality by allowing the workers a say in the compensation of middle and upper management.
That’s why no country has achieved communism they are all authoritarian!
Context for those who are baffled (I was)
https://news.itsfoss.com/linus-torvalds-woke-communists/
No Linus hasn’t grabbed a red rag and isn’t off to foment revolution
I liked the take by the utterly clueless Polish guy in the comment. I think his complete lack of understanding of any context is quite typical of online political conversation, especially when semantics come into play.
Also Linus did call for “Total world domination” (I have the tshirt).
Yes of course, who doesn’t remember how woke Lenin created a woke revolution based on woke teachings of woke Marx and even woker Engels.
Guy’s Finnish. The chances of him being actually communist are pretty much zero.
This might be a dumb question: what do you mean? I know very little about Finland, so I’m just genuinely curious. Are the Finns in particular well-known for being anti-communist or is it more like a geopolitical thing since they share a border with Russia?
Geopolitical yeah
I don't know where this idea that all Finns are anti-communist comes from. Finland had one of the strongest communist movements in Western Europe during the cold war. At the height of their popularity about one in four Finns voted for communists in elections. Card carrying communists sat as ministers in multiple cabinets, up to the early 1980s. Like many young people of his generation, Linus Torvalds' father was a member of the Communist Party of Finland in the 1970s. And all this happened after Finland had fought against the Soviet Union in the 2nd world war.
His father was into the communist party
unfortunately I think this is just him saying he’s a “woke communist” if being a woke communist is atheism, women’s rights, and gun control. I don’t think he’s a marxist of any stripe it seems. However, I am willing to be corrected here. I’ve only seen this post regarding to him
The Linux to trans anarchocommunist catgirl pipeline is very real. The moment you move to Arch it’s already over.
I’m feeling called out
I just installed pop!_os am I safe?
that’s how I started. nobody’s safe.
Sorry, I don’t speak nyah
Slippery slope my friend!
Oh and don’t forget the autistic-to-linuxer pipeline
I think I could have backed off after moving to Arch. The point of no return was Rust
As someone who recently fell in love with EndeavorOS I don’t wanna fall down the cat girl pipeline…
It’s to late brother. It’s to late.
uWu
It didn’t happen to me despite using Linux for 8 years. I guess I am a Windows user in disguise.
:3 .
Well, I’m probably fucked then. I even have Arch on my gaming PC with KDE and Arch on my school laptop with GNOME(Gnome for Laptops is insanely cool)
rant:
I have been using Linux since 2006, a lefty and against the super-rich and big corporations since I remember (to the point of avoiding their products like the plague), also never having understood or accepted gender roles and other stupid traditional concepts, yet never turned into a communist 🤷
It baffles me that so many people think that respecting gender equality, understanding the evil in big corporations and avoiding them, valuing community and being tolerant (except for intolerance) and against discrimination somehow equals communism… I say this because I’ve been called a communist by many people who know me, while I have always rejected it explicitly!
/rant
What economic model do you believe in?
I can’t really say I believe in a specific model, but to my knowledge, and for the current version of our world, welfare states seem to be doing the least worse currently. But really, I think our world is kinda too fucked up right now to be able to have any good social-economic system (in terms of maximum equality and minimum suffering, I guess.)
Ideally, I’d prefer no state, only local communities managing themselves (something like city states, maybe?) and their relations to other communities… but I know it’s just a dream, at least for the foreseeable future, considering the current realities and the ass-people in power. Because that would need many really peaceful, non-greedy and non-selfish people, which… well, never mind.
P.s. Sorry for the pessimism, and I might be wrong of course, which I really hope I am.
You’re describing communalism, if you’re interested.
Thanks. Maybe, kind of. My knowledge on the topic is limited, but I think communalism (or some version of it) could involve some form of loyalty to one’s ethnic group or community, which absolutely disagree with.
Social responsibility: Yes. But loyalty, especially towards something ultimately meaningless such as ethnicity: No.
My values are respecting individual choices, rights and well-being of others (which also entails some responsibility).I completely agree. However, as I understand, the tradition as it stems from Murray Bookchin explicitly condemns this arbitrary categorisation.
local communities managing themselves (something like city states maybe?) and their relations to other communities
Your describing a Soviet you filthy commie.
But for real what your describing is communism as marx originally thought of it. The one example marx gave as a model for what communism would be was the Paris commune which adheres to a lot of what you said. Most leftist agree that that’s the end goal it’s just a matter of how to get there. Lenin originally pitched the Soviet Union as just that, a bunch of local councils(soviets) freely cooperating and making there own rules. He saw how the Paris commune’s openness and military indecisiveness led to it being brutally suppressed though and wanted an interim top down dictatorship and rapid brutal industrialization to handle this threat. The threat never went away though, first with the Nazis almost annihilating them then the u.s. pointing nukes at them, so neither did the dictatorship.
Their end goal was still avowedly the same though, and communism, to me at least, is about that goal. Their are a bunch of different theoretical paths to it, and there’s tonnes of infighting as to which ones the best, but all communists agree that the commune/Soviet/city state should have all the power.
Thanks for the explanation.
The problem is exactly the “how”, as you described. And personally, I don’t really have any idea, since all the possible ways seem to involve somehow contradicting that goal “temporarily” (by using violence, limiting individual liberties, etc.), which I don’t like. I think maybe over time, (a very long time, perhaps?) the way of thinking of human societies will slowly (and through a painful process) shift to that direction (and maybe not! who knows!).
Either way, life is painful and world is cruel.
That’s pretty similar to the social democratic system that they had in Sweden before the 90s. Many critical services were government agencies, such as the railroad, the phone network, and the pharmacies. Health care and rental housing were handled by the municipality or the county.
And they got the idea from URSS
I would say you are somewhere between arnachism and socialism with that view but I am no expert ether!
Those two have big overlaps. “Libertarian socialism” used to be another term for anarchism.
Id recommend you reading “socialism: utopian and scientific” by Engels. Because to me you sound exactly like the utopian socialist of the past.
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Sounds a lot like me. That’s not communism, that’s just being a decent person. One that respects others and just wants everyone to live a good life without being the target of hate and harassment.
That’s overlapping with communism.
Linus Torvalds is a “full-blown woke communist”? Citation needed.
I have been a FOSS enthusiast since my preteen or early teenage years (mid-to-late 2000s), yet I am not in any sense a communist.
“full-blown woke communist” is US-speak for “Scandinavian socialist”
The term you want is social democrat, which isn’t socialism but hey, it tries to like, stop people starving to death on the street, if only because it looks ugly.
Nah literally anyone who advocates for basic human rights is a “full blown woke communist”.
unfortunately I think this is just him saying he’s a “woke communist” if being a woke communist is atheism, women’s rights, and gun control. I don’t think he’s a marxist of any stripe it seems. However, I am willing to be corrected here. I’ve only seen this post regarding to him.
But Linux is
I think his point is that people who call things “woke communism”, in a negative way, have no idea what communism actually is. To those people, everything from the center to the left of politics is woke communism.
Ugh I should probably try reading things
if libs are comfortable calling themselves commie in any context that makes our job easier.
I don't think it has a meaningful effect. Libs call themselves socialists all the time. For every case you're able to argue for socialism and not have people's brains shut down, you get 10 "those tankies aren't real socialists! Socialism is when you  for food stamps and means-tested college subsidies"
His dad was a straight up member of the Finnish Communist Party. He’s still alive, and is even a member of the European Parliament, but seems more liberal/centrist these days.
Linus himself seems to be pretty mum on politics.
He made a comment sarcastically and replied to an accusation labeling himself as such
sudo apt-get install anarchismI now love Debian more than I previously thought possible.
brb installing Debian on all my hardware.
edit: there’s a
fortune-anarchismtoo, amazing.
AUR package: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/anarchism
(the pkgbuild is literally just extracting the deb and archiving it again to an arch package lol)
I too just turned into a Marxist after finding out about Linux and software freedom in 2020 lol
I think there might be more than a handful of us. Welcome, comrade.
🫡
welcome comrade!Shit this is too accurate
…I just didn’t want windows advertising to me.
Literally same, even the years match up lol
Yeah, I love the FOSS philosophy and I would be a communist if I didn’t know that in my country and in every other country where communism is/was, it became a dictatorship doing reallly horrible things. I simply don’t have the trust in people to believe communism is possible without violation of human rights. It’s sad.
in every other country where communism is/was
There is not a single country that has achieved communism.
Then what is it? A teapot in the sky?
If it’s a viable plan which can be realized, then how to achieve it, without killing people and creating a dictatorship? Is it possible?I might be wrong, but it seems to me that any effort to establish communism will eventually fail with a lot paid in vain, and many lives lost, as has happened so far.
If that viable plan needs time to be accepted more widely, then maybe we should simply wait and try to be decent people in the meantime, instead of trying now to establish a “temporary” dictatorship actively as a way of “transition”. And if the plan can be acted upon right now, then again the question is how (without resorting to violence and tyranny, of course). That question remains open to me. And it’s a big one.
Then what is it? A teapot in the sky?
In such countries there was/is socialism. They only tried/trying to build communism. This is a common misconception.
If it’s a viable plan which can be realized, then how to achieve it, without killing people and creating a dictatorship? Is it possible?
I don't know. But I doubt that the state will give up its powers without any fight.
Sorry then, I should have written In every other country ruled by communists saying they are building communism, banning every other political party then the communist one, killing people in the name of communism. I see their unability to achieve communism even when they’ve had full control over country for decades as a proof of that it’s not really possible.
My understanding is that these days people treat it more like an ideal to strive toward under current democratic systems. For instance, how would you feel about UBI being introduced under your current system of governance?
Red Hat UBI? It’s awesome
*JK, but Red Hat UBI really Awesome!
Looks like you have a lot to learn
Thanks for your valuable input, you opened my eyes.
Communism = fascism. We have plenty of historical data to support that.
No. They are not equal and neither same. If you understand Italian I suggest you to search for Prof. Barbero videos on the topic. They are quite better than anything I'll be able to convey.
Fascism:
It's an authoritarian dictatorship happened between 1914 and 1945 in Italy. The fascist regime and ideology was strictly based on Mussolini's figure, people marched in straight lines down the streets, everyone wearing the same uniforms and Italy was a great imperialist nation (lol jk it wasn't but they quite believed it). Fascism and the fascist party stopped existing after partisans overthrew the regime. Fascism is a 20 years long dictatorship. After that there were some regimes around the world that were inspired by Mussolini such as the current ruling party Italy Fratelli d'Italia, Marine le Pen's party in France, those shitty AFD in Germany, orban's Regime, franco in Spain etc etc. They are called neofascists, because Fascism was a 20 years long regime happened in Italy between 1914 and 1945.
Communism:
Communism is a model of governace that's never been achieved in human history, as someone above said it's about classless, stateless, governance models. It's been around for like 200 years (the Communist Party Manifesto is from 1848), and in every country of the world there is/ has been a Communist Party and as we know they were always persecuted for being communist, stopped from going to the government and stopped from bulding a classless society when they managed to get to govern. Just see what the USA did in the last 50/60 years in every country that risked a communist government: Chile and latin America in general, Italy and so on an so forth.
Fascism =/= communism, and if you say the contrary you just don't know how they work.
As an ardent fascist, please don’t water down terms.
All authoritarianism isn’t fascism, and communism is authoritarian but very not fascist.
I might be a little confused here… Are you calling yourself a fascist?
In the absence of an answer I would just like to remind you that dbzer0 seems to not be the place for you. Maybe fascists cannot read very well, but on the signup screen it says explicitly:
Note that this is an anarchist server. If you start promoting right-wing rhetoric, expect to be banned.
I do not think you should feel very welcome here at all. Maybe just leave Lemmy altogether?
Sorry, is this a reply on my comment?
No, the comment I replied to was removed. See my message for context.
Nah, only kidding. I'm a national socialist, much cooler 😎
Looked through your comments and seems you are just not very bright. Funny you play that nationalist shit while at the same time being a disgrace to your own nation.
I live in the central europe and I have plenty of historical data about every country that was part of the Soviet Union being authoritarian at the same time. You probably couldn’t imagine what was happening here. I don’t have so much knowledge about the rest of the world, but I think I heard about some genocide and concentration camps in china recently…
In my view Torvalds is more of a pragmatic stoicist.
