Closed source goals are profit. Open source goals are to solve a problem.
Open source goals are to solve a problem.
To solve a problem. Again. In Rust!
/s
I like this much more than the Linux becomes Marxism meme.
Similar vibe, but I think ‘marxism’ is not the only conclusion from realising how much megacorps control our world. I’m more of a left-anarchist myself :U
As a leftist/liberal who doesn’t know too much about polsci, how would anarchism function on a grand scale? Genuine curiosity.
Anarchism is less a system of functions to be implemented, and more of a governing philosophy on how we build other systems. That philosophy focuses heavily on the expansion of democracy and the elimination of hierarchy wherever possible in order to create the most total freedom in the system. It is not inherently opposed to the concepts of governance or laws as many believe. It usually means focusing on smaller governing units, preferring local governance wherever possible, to give people the most direct control over their own lives. Self-sufficient communities are a major goal here.
The meaning of freedom to an anarchist is wholistic; not just freedom to, but also freedom from. Freedom to pursue your life on your terms, freedom from any obligation or inhibition that would prevent or detract from that goal. This includes, for example, unconditional freedom for all people from starvation, homelessness, or the inability to access medical care. It is an intentionally utopian ideal, that we should strive for something that may not even be possible, because that is how we’ll create the best possible world.
Once upon a time, anarchism was effectively synonymous with libertarianism. That word was bastardized in America to the point that it is unrecognizable now.
Well. That’s a wholly different picture than the word itself paints.
It’s almost sad, as anarchist has such a negative connotation that, to me, it feels what you’re describing may deserve a new name to relieve it of the baggage associated with the name. It will be awfully hard to get people to listen in America when it’s so saturated with the idea that anarchism is, well… anarchic, ungoverned chaos.
The broader tradition of political thought that anarchism falls under is libertarianism. That one also doesn’t have great connotations for obvious reasons, unfortunately. If you’re interested in learning more about anarchism ;Zoe Baker, Anark, Andrewism are great YouTube channels with very comprehensive videos on history, theory, and praxis. Be warned, Zoe bakers delivery is dryer than a saltine and anark is very theory focused and many of his videos are 90 min+
Zoe Baker is a PhD in anarchist history. Anark has several videos on revolutionary politics and theory. His most recent series is a synthesis of many strains of anarchism to form a modern iteration of anarchism. Kind of “bringing it all together”. Andrewism is focused on black anarchism, pan-africanism, degrowth, solar punk and a lot of other praxis, lifestyle, and activism. Between the three of them I doubt there’s a question on anarchism and liberatory politics that couldn’t be answered
This is a complex question difficult to answer in a comment. I also see others who call themselves anarchist say it’s about smaller governing units and isn’t without law. I disagree.
Anarchism is about not having rulers, at any level, whether that’s a country or an HOA. It’s about being free from coerced decisions (therefore democracy is inherently non-anarchist – because those who didn’t win the vote will be coerced). But this doesn’t mean that it’s chaos. Order does not require authority or coercion, it only requires people who want to work together and make decisions together.
I’m of the opinion that actual sustainable anarcho-communism isn’t something that can work with 8 billion people on Earth (no that does not mean I want to genocide anyone), it’s not something we should expect to attain while retaining all the hallmarks of our current world, e.g. massive population, cars, skyscrapers, air travel for pleasure, and cities with tens of millions of people.
Our current population level is pathological - Earth will fail with numbers in this range regardless of whether we can create enough nitrogen fertilizer or build enough houses. Our numbers grew so large because greedy people realized they could use authority and tools like capitalism to extract the wealth of others, and the more others the more wealth.
For those that disagree, view a human population growth over 1000 years and tell me that’s sustainable. The methods that can work in 2023 with 8 billion people and what methods that are actually tenable for a sustainable human population are not necessarily the same (anarchism/anarcho-communism IMHO could not function on a scale as grand as we are now - and that’s not a flaw of anarchism, it’s a problem with our numbers).
Also, I don’t think anarcho-communism is something we could move into quickly, it would require at like a generation of cultural change. All of us have been born and raised in an exploitative system and can hardly imagine a world where exploitation was not the norm (thus your question) and if it were dropped on us it would quickly devolve into chaos and warlords.
IMHO, we get to anarchism not via revolution, but by evolving culturally to where we no longer need a state.
I recommend reading Kropotkin and David Graeber.
My brother lent me “The History of Everything” and it’s appealing, but in the end i couldn’t go along with it because a) it billed itself as an academic work but was a polemic and b) the privilege of the authors screamed across every page, as much as they stated that they weren’t.
IMO, anarchism fails to confront the fact that there are malignant psychopathic in the world. As much as they claim not to fall into the Noble Savage trap, that was the essence of the book.
There will always be exploitative people, and assuming that a Return to Nature (regardless of the many other benefits to sustainability that I in no way want to impugn) will eliminate that is, in my view, somewhat naive.
Sorry for the late reply…
IMO, anarchism fails to confront the fact that there are malignant psychopathic in the world. As much as they claim not to fall into the Noble Savage trap, that was the essence of the book.
There will always be exploitative people, and assuming that a Return to Nature (regardless of the many other benefits to sustainability that I in no way want to impugn) will eliminate that is, in my view, somewhat naive.
Now THIS is an interesting topic! It’s also where I diverge from some who call themselves anarchist.
Anarchism itself says nothing on the topic. Anarchism is about society without rulers, that’s all. Everything else is some person’s POV, or some book, or some Redditor, etc.
I absolutely do not fail to confront the fact that there are malignant psychopathic people in the world. Here’s my views on this.
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Humans as a species have evolved to be a cooperative species
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Most humans are cooperative in most ways, if this were not true, leaving your house would be 1000x more frought with danger the world over.
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The near complete lack of ability to experience empathy is the defining quality of psychopathy
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Good and bad are actually easy to define in most cases. A bad act is one where someone causes suffering or is willing to cause suffering to others for gain. This is based only on 3 axioms – no religion or complex philosophy needed.
- Life is desirable
- Others can suffer just like I can
- I don’t have any more right to cause suffering in others than they do to cause me suffering
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Like any personality trait in any species, empathy probably follows a “normal distribution”, i.e. some people have too little empathy, others too much, most people have about the right amount needed to thrive in the groups we evolved in.
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Effective anarchism (i.e. a lack of coercive rulers, not a lack of a respected non-coercive leader) was probably a common, maybe even the most common societal organization prior to “civilization”. Anarchism was the norm for thousands of years.
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This effective anarchism way of life was sustainable for so long despite the existence of psychopaths – because these tribes probably dealt with their psychopaths as they were not prevented from doing so by a state.
A person who committed a serious offense against the tribe, or that got the tribe in trouble with another may have been killed, and that death seen as necessary for the well being of the tribe.
The problem with the state, being a monopoly on violence, is that it prevents people and groups from protecting themselves and often doesn’t itself hold offenders responsible. The psychopath that might have been killed in the past, maybe even by their own tribe for everyone’s well being is now often protected by the law. Instead of putting psychopaths in prison, the state typically puts people in prison that are just doing what’s needed to get by or have grown to be fucked up (nurture vs nature) because of the fucked up community they were forced to grow up in due to others hoarding resources and oppressing their population. That is to say, I don’t think your typical criminal is a bad person deep down, they’ve been put into a situation where being a “bad actor” is a logical position.
–> For anarchism to work, we have to realize that while 99% of people are good and cooperative enough to make things work, the 1% of psychopaths must be dealt with and prevented from gaining power or we end up where we are now. Currently, our system tends to put psychopaths in position as our leaders.
–> Any system or ideology that claims that a huge portion of humanity is bad, rather than mislead, is a non-starter. What are we gonna do, purge?
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But can someone explain to me why these free computer programs are the best built, most functional, money saving, quality of life improving programs I’ve ever used? Leaving dark patterns behind has my quality of life so much better.
Turns out pure profit incentive only goes so far in incentivising “quality products and services”, and after a while it becomes literally mandatory to be an asshole in order to continue following the profit.
Even paid Libre projects (of which there are a couple) tend to be less dickish than their blackbox cousins, after all, if they were chasing maximum profit and infinite growth, they wouldn’t be a libre project now would they?
Corporations have the need to continuously add features in order to keep selling their product. So the outcome is more often than not, buggy and resource hungry software. In contrast FOSS doesn’t have the need to add features for the sake of it, so only the genuinely useful features are implemented, usually.
i think it’s because they are made by someone that actually uses them in contrast to som of the software from large companies that need to make money and don’t give two hoots about usability
Most of these are created and maintained by people who are just like you and me and care about freedom and privacy. I think open source projects really reflects the “humanity” aspect of human civilization, it sounds a bit odd, but when you think about it, there is very less incentive for normal people to contribute to the open source. It is the frustration from dark patterns that give people some motivation to support and contribute to open source. This is atleast how I see it and why I so strongly support the FOSS cause, other people may view it differently but to me it reflects on humanity.
Because they are Free!(as in freedom)
Freedom 3 gives users who use the program to improve it and give it back to the community
I’m trying to remember what my gateway drug into FOSS was. VLC is a strong contender, but it might’ve been OpenOffice for me
Mine was Inkscape, back in the early days of the MLP fandom, when I learned I could make show-accurate art using this entirely free computer program. Which lead to using it to make like, memes and shitposts and stuff for fandom shit.
Like I’d used free software before – But seeing Inkscape in action and then, a year later, getting into college for design-related stuff and learning that people used Adobe Illustrator (which costs a fortune) for the same things was my ‘oh cool, my free thing can do most if not all the stuff this expensive tool can’
From then on there was no going back.
'Twas GIMP for me. I use it all the time for work (not graphical design, just basic business engineering stuff like annotating photos for figures in documents and such). The companies are too stingy for Photoshop for a person in my position and I refuse to turn in janky MS Paint markups.
One company IT tech that I requested an install for GIMP on the computer said that I was the only one using it in the entire company (5000 people). I was like, what, how do you all annotate figures and whatnot. Just a shrug in response, leading me to think it’s MS Paint.
Mine was Windows. It became so bad I decided to say “fuck it, linux might be hard but anything is better than this bullshit”.
Now I know that windows isn’t just a bad implementation of an OS, it’s fundamentally a bad concept. If you can even call that mess a concept.
mine started with valve. just hearing about them making contributions to stuff like wine or proton for free at first, then getting my hands on a steam deck and being introduced to Linux for the first time, and it was all downhill from there
Redirector did it for me. The I found out about libredirect and started using alternative front ends for everything. from there I switched over to Linux and that’s all she wrote
I was lucky because my dad has always been a linux user so I’ve been using open source software since my first computer. I’m now in college for computer science and I don’t think I would be if I hadn’t been exposed to so much good open source software
For me it was because I had a super old computer, and Windows refused to run smoothly on it. So I installed Xubuntu, and it ran better than most computers ran on Windows.
Mine was taking up software development as a kid. “I made a cool program that solves a particular problem I’m having. I wonder if others might also want it.” Not much later I discovered the concept of FOSS.
I was gonna say Evil Player for me, but looking back, it was free but not opensource. So probably Firefox, then Ubuntu for me.
VLC almost did it for me until I found XBMC (now named Kodi). Which wasn’t as stable as VLC but had better features and was multiplatform too so from there I decided to give Linux a try after windows borked my pc since i only wanted xbmc hooked up to a tv.
It’s crazy to me that at this point. I feel like purchasing an app for $79.00 for a lifetime license feels emotionally like a FOSS. It’s “free after a one time fee” - that marketing could practically work on me at this point. But since lifetime licenses are disappearing left and right, FOSS is the only future for continued development
To be honest.
Samesies.
I was happy to buy (the very proprietary, very commercial) Magix Vegas. Why?
Because gasp. It had an option where I paid them money and I just. Had the application. No yearly subscription, no log in every time I turn on the programme.
Just. A one-time activation. Holy shit. I use it for my work and woooooowww.
Even though it can’t use my AMD GPU properly.
And just not honored
other way round for me
Yeah actually I feel like it goes the other way quite a bit as well
I’ll always upvote me some Jeremy Bentham references.
literally what i went through as well
I feel attacked :D
