FOSS does not align with Free Market Capitalist views, because it’s a rejection of individual ownership of property
That’s just not true. FOSS is an explicit grant of rights to my property to the public at large. There’s no compulsion to make my work public, and I can even keep my modifications to a FOSS project to myself and not share it. FOSS leaves me, the contributor, in control of what I want to do with my work. If I’m the sole contributor, I can even change the license that my work is in, I just can’t revoke previously released versions of the software.
In many cases, it makes more sense for companies to collaborate on a project than to build everything themselves. Look at Linux, most development comes from for-profit companies because distributing the burden of maintenance happens to be good for business. We see rival orgs like Huawei/Samsung, Intel/AMD, and RedHat/SUSE among the top contributors. They could keep those changes to themselves, but maintaining those changes long-term would cost more than the benefit they’d get from keeping them to themselves.
is because Reddit is a Capitalist entity
That’s just not true. I liked Reddit for years, but they slowly changed their model away from what worked for years. There were two directions they could’ve gone:
privacy oriented - offer low-cost, paid subscriptions to avoid ads - Reddit Gold failed because it was too expensive IMO, not because the model was poor
ad-supported - put ads on content, and harvest data to serve more relevant ads
They picked the latter, so I left because that wasn’t the direction I wanted the platform to go. They can still make money off the IP and I have no problem with that, and if they chose a privacy-oriented approach, I would still be there. But they didn’t.
I’m also totally fine with them charging for API access, I’m not okay with the amount they charged (which was way more than they’d get from ads through their app).
Believing honestly that FOSS works better than the alternatives is a leftist stance
Maybe if taking it to the extreme (i.e. FOSS always works better than the alternatives). But if taken situationally, I think it is totally a free capitalist mindset. For example, video games make a ton of sense being proprietary software, whereas game engines make a lot of sense being free software (or at least source-available, like Unreal Engine). In general, platforms are better as FOSS, whereas products are better as proprietary software. FOSS generally sucks for making products, proprietary software generally sucks for platforms because maintenance costs are so high.
You can absolutely take advantage of an explicitly leftist structure and use it for Capitalist gain in Capitalism, but that doesn’t make the structure Capitalist. It’s a rejection of Capitalism.
The enshittification of Reddit is precisely because it’s a Capitalist entity. It wasn’t as profitable to do what worked, so they made it worse and upped their profit margins. Not sure why you struggle to see that.
Thinking FOSS is better in some situations is devoid of being a Free-Market Capitalist stance, and is more leftist. Markets themselves are not Capitalist, by siding with FOSS, even in certain instances, you are saying leftist structures are better than Capitalist structures in certain instances. That’s more of a pro-market stance than a pro-Capitalism stance.
You’re tying Capitalism to a rejection of Capitalism, when that doesn’t make sense. You should just accept that you have some leftist views with regards to how the economy should be structured, rather than contort your worldview to make illogical connections. I’m not asking you to change your views, just accept correct labeling of them.
But it’s not leftist. Stallman certainly wanted it to be when he created the GPL, but it has worked incredibly well (and perhaps better) as a capitalist structure. It turns out, things like standards reduce costs overall, so you’ll get a better return on your capital by cooperating with others than keeping everything to yourself.
You can see this across the board. Most products are a derivative of other works, and being able to focus on your unique value proposition dramatically reduces costs and thus increases return on capital.
The whole notion of intellectual property is anti-capitalist, it’s government protectionism. Before IP laws were a thing, people built on each other’s innovations without restraint. Sometimes that lead to copycat works, and sometimes it lead to new works. IP law restricts derivative works, FOSS allows it, but puts limitations on them. I personally believe IP laws are one of the biggest hurdles to innovation and believe we should have much shorter patent and copyright duration to encourage more derivative works. FOSS is but one way to get around the current system.
because it’s a Capitalist entity
No, it’s because the leadership is stupid.
There are other privacy-respecting, “capitalist” companies that do just fine, they just have a different profit model. However, it just so happens that the masses seem to prefer paying with data and ad time over money for services. I don’t, so I avoid ad-supported services, mostly because I think that runs counter to the type of content I want to see. Sometimes that means I use FOSS, and sometimes that means I use privacy-respecting proprietary software.
When I used Reddit, I paid for an ad-free, proprietary mobile app. I’d do the same today if Reddit allowed fair competition with its app. But they have decided that ads, data collection, and mass appeal are the direction they want to go.
leftist structures are better than Capitalist structures in certain instances
I certainly believe that’s true, I just don’t think FOSS is inherently leftist. It’s a tool that works well both for capitalist and socialist interests, it has no economic or political bias.
Here are some areas where I think leftist structures are superior:
education - I’m a fan of charter schools, and I think they should be run as co-ops owned by the teachers
utilities - these are natural monopolies, so they should be run as a service to the community; that said, raw materials used by the utility could be for-profit (depending)
banking - credit unions beat for profit banks in pretty much every area
I absolutely do have some leftist views, in fact I’m probably more left than both major US parties, on net. The left/right spectrum isn’t as interesting to me as the liberty/authoritarian spectrum. I want government to be less involved in my life, and I don’t really care if the solutions that make that happen come from the left or the right. But to me, FOSS isn’t either, it’s just a way for me to decide how I want my work to be used by others.
Oh, but it is. Leftism is a rejection of hierarchy and individual ownership of the Means of Production, while FOSS is a rejection of ownertship. Again, you’re incorrectly tying Capitalist entities taking advantage of leftist products as a way to call the leftist products Capitalist. FOSS itself is leftist, regardless of who uses it.
IP is absolutely Capitalist, Capitalism is all about profiting off of ownership of property, as opposed to creating Value. Rent-seeking is built into Capitalism, that’s why it still exists, it consolidates power and influences the state. Believing Capitalism contains within itself the contradictions that work against itself is a leftist belief, after all!
Capitalist companies can certainly choose to make a better product, but that does not mean Reddit’s choice to pursue profit over a better product was not caused by Capitalism.
All in all, I really do think you need to understand that structures themselves can be left and used by right wing entities. FOSS is leftist itself and does not care who uses it, that does not make it Capitalistic if a Capitalist uses it.
But it’s not. If it was, I could relicense any GPL project to whatever I want because nobody owns it. The GPL is very interested in ownership, to the point where all contributors must agree to a license change or those contributions must be removed.
Capitalism is all about profiting off of ownership of property
No, it’s about profiting off of capital. Property is one form of capital, though I reject the idea that IP is valid, I don’t believe anyone has an exclusive right to ideas. So my support of IP law in any form is purely pragmatic.
Basically, I derive rights from whatever could morally exist w/o a government w/o an initiation of force. In order for someone to take my real property, they would need to initiate force against me to deprive me of using it. In order for someone to use my intellectual property, they just need to see/hear it, and their use does not deprive me of using it, therefore no force.
So no, I reject the idea that IP has any moral foundation, it’s merely a structure governments use to encourage sharing of IP. FOSS is a community-driven way of achieving the same thing, just without the period of exclusivity. So IP law is a corruption of capitalism, not a feature of capitalism.
Capitalist companies can certainly choose to make a better product, but that does not mean Reddit’s choice to pursue profit over a better product was not caused by Capitalism.
Sure, but it wasn’t inevitable. There are multiple ways to profit from a given class of product, and Reddit chose the one they thought would appeal to investors. I think that’s short-sighted and probably an indication that /u/spez is looking for an exist, not to build a quality product.
So I left. Reddit no longer appealed to me as a user, so I found something that works better for me. I actually started building my own, but Lemmy was “good enough,” so here I am. I’m still working on that project in my spare time, but not with the energy I once did. I don’t want to run a SM app, I just want something that works reasonably well. I left Facebook for Reddit for the same reasons.
structures themselves can be left and used by right wing entities
I agree, I just disagree that it applies to FOSS.
For example, many co-ops are leftist because the structure is all about spreading out the ownership of the organization among the workers. Perhaps the most relevant is an HOA, is owned by the residents of the community, who elect representatives to make decisions for the whole. A lot of right-wing people develop and live in areas with an HOA as evidenced by the way suburbs tend to vote. So I agree with the premise, I just disagree that it applies to FOSS.
I have no problem using leftist or right-wing structures, neither is a particularly dirty word, provided it’s not a top-down structure. I reject authoritarianism, and I don’t particularly care about which economic systems are used to solve problems (e.g. I think georgism has a lot of value for real property, socialism is great for certain types of orgs, and capitalism should be the way our markets work in general). FOSS doesn’t really fall on that spectrum for me, it’s just a way to structure a contract between individuals for mutual gain.
But it is. FOSS is free and open source software, not Capitalist owned IP. Simple as.
Capitalism is many things, but primarily is rent-seeking off of owning Capital. I used the term property instead of Capital because we are talking about IP, but it’s nearly interchangeable.
You can’t support Capitalism without being a statist. Capitalism requires a monopoly on violence to exist.
The fact that Capitalism ruined Reddit yet that could have been avoided does not mean it isn’t the fault of Capitalism. That’s like saying someone shooting someone else to desth isn’t their fault, because the gun could have misfired.
Again, I really think you’re misunderstanding FOSS as a concept being different from FOSS as used by people.
Capitalism requires a monopoly on violence to exist.
That’s just not true. Capitalism is what happens when there is no force. Human nature is such that society would probably devolve into despotic states, but the economic system would likely still be capitalist.
Government prevents degrading into anarchy, and is a useful tool to prevent the worst of the bad outcomes (e.g. slavery, murder, etc).
You’ll even see capitalism existing within authoritarian situations, like prison, dictatorships, etc. It’s the default economic system people reach for.
does not mean it isn’t the fault of Capitalism
But it does. Capitalism didn’t cause /u/spez to choose ads over a subscription model, that was his free choice. There are multiple viable profit models, and he chose one that I didn’t like.
Don’t blame the economic system, blame the CEO.
I really think you’re misunderstanding FOSS as a concept
And I think you’re putting politics where it doesn’t belong.
FOSS isn’t inherently socialist, just like a tractor isn’t. It’s a tool, and it can be used to socialist and capitalist ends.
For example, the AGPL is frequently used to prevent competitors from effectively using a service, while also getting free contributions from the community. Those orgs often require signing over copyright for any contributions as well, so the work becomes the property of the company. At all points, the corporation has sole ownership of the source code. So who owns the “means of production” in this case? The corporation.
On the flipside, you have projects like Linux where contributors retain their own copyright and the software is essentially communally owned. So who owns the “means of production” in this case? The community as a whole.
It’s not the license that’s socialist, but the project management. FOSS is merely a grant to use, modify, and redistribute changes to a work owned by someone else. It’s not a grant to share in ownership, otherwise you wouldn’t have the limitations specified in the license.
No, Capitalism isn’t what happens when there’s no force, that’s absurd. Capitalism requires a divide between Workers and Owners, which itself is forced hierarchy, and is upheld by a state. Government can be useful, yes, but Capitalism as an economic system is built on force.
You’re also twisting the quote around its original meaning, “don’t hate the player, hate the game,” when it would’ve been more accurate to keep it as is. “Don’t hate spez, hate Capitalism,” as Capitalism is what created the conditions and incentives for spez to make money via making Reddit shit.
FOSS is a tool with expressed non-ownership and a rejection of taking profit. If a hammer was free for everyone to use and anyone could clone it, that would be a leftist hammer too.
You’re trying really hard here, but given that you somehow think Capitalism is when you don’t have force means you really do need to go back to the drawing board.
Capitalism requires a divide between Workers and Owners, which itself is forced hierarchy, and is upheld by a state
But it doesn’t, owners and workers can be the same individuals. I am a worker in my 9-5 job, and an owner through my retirement plan based on stocks. There’s no class divide, just different roles.
an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market
This is the common definition of capitalism as near as I can tell, and nowhere in there is a monopoly on force required.
Saying capitalism requires a state is like saying socialism requires a state. You can have socialism within capitalism unless the state forbids it (e.g. co-ops and other forms of worker owner orgs), and you can probably have limited capitalism within socialism if the state permits it. They’re just different ways of producing goods, and both can exist without the state.
FOSS is a tool with expressed non-ownership
No, FOSS is a tool with expressed granting of rights, but not complete rights, to a work. If we restrict ourselves to “free software” (FOSS covers open source as well), you get the four freedoms: use, distribute, modify, and distribute modifications. That’s it, you don’t get full rights of ownership. Some FOSS licenses expand or reduce these freedoms, but we’ll stick with the FSF definition for now.
But that only matters if there’s a practical difference between ownership and non-ownership. With something like Linux, there are so many owners over various parts of the code that everyone practically has the same rights. However, with projects like MongoDB, all contributors sign over rights, so Mongo the company retains more rights than anyone else. You could call Linux “effectively socialist,” whereas that’s not true with Mongo.
FOSS explicitly doesn’t reassign copyright (i.e. ownership), so it cannot be social ownership. It’s individual ownership of parts of the means of a product and a grant of rights both for the product and (for copyleft licenses) future derivative works, so it’s more like a publicly traded company (shareholders are the contributors) than a cooperative…
But my point here is that FOSS isn’t an economic system, it’s a license grant, so comparing it to socialism or capitalism misses the point entirely.
A grant of rights is not ownership. If you own something, you can do whatever you want with it. If you’re granted rights to something, you are limited by the terms of the agreement.
For example, with the GPL, you are not allowed to use any (substantial) portion of the work in a propriety product. However, if you’re the author of that portion, you can.
Common ownership means everyone has the same rights related to the software. And that’s just not true for FOSS, though it can effectively be true for certain projects, provided there are enough authors. Linux is effectively commonly owned because getting every author to reassign ownership is infeasible, whereas that’s exactly not the case with MongoDB, where you sign over all copyright interest, so they completely own the work.
FOSS doesn’t require shared ownership, only shared rights, so it’s not socialist.
This all relies on a rather restrictive, and, I suspect, personally tailored definition of “ownership”. Common ownership simply means anyone can freely use something however they want. That is absolutely true of the vast majority of FOSS. And in this sense, shared rights amounts to the same as shared ownership.
Pointing out that it doesn’t allow you to cut off sharing sort of misses the forest for the trees. Of course public ownership demands the continuance of public ownership.
Common ownership simply means anyone can freely use something however they want.
I think it’s a little more complicated than that. But the problem is, digital assets are quite different from physical ones, since I can easily modify a digital asset w/o impacting anyone else, whereas I cannot do the same with a physical good. The closest analogy here is a library, where I can take a book and do whatever I want with it. However, I need to return it to the library in a similar condition as I got it or I’d exclude others from using that asset in the same way I was able to use it. If I don’t, I’m usually prevented from borrowing other books until I replace the book (or the library waves the infraction). I don’t own library books, the library does, but I can freely use the books under the terms provided.
And that’s why I think IP is artificial. Copyright is only enforced by a central authority, whereas real property ownership can be enforced by the possessor without a central authority. So ownership of IP doesn’t mean the same as ownership of real property. W/o a central authority, nobody really owns IP, which kind of means everyone owns it, since everyone has full rights w/ regards to every work they can access. But with a central authority, ownership is defined by that authority based on whatever its copyright laws state. In the US, there’s a single owner for any work (can be a person or an organization), unless it’s placed in the public domain. In a socialist country, perhaps there’s no concept of IP for citizens of that country.
So the truly “socialist” IP model is public domain, which means everyone has equivalent rights to the work. However, that also means anyone can modify it and claim complete ownership over the modified work, excluding others from those improvements. FOSS works around this by requiring all modification to be licensed such that it preserves the four freedoms (again, focusing on the F part of that acronym), but it doesn’t grant actual ownership to others contributions, it merely provides a license to use them. But that isn’t communal ownership, it’s merely a common agreement among separate owners over a combined work.
That’s why I don’t see FOSS as socialist, capitalist, or any form of economic model, it’s just a way to force future versions of a product to remain under the same terms.
What exactly do you think capitalism and socialism are, dude? You’re absolutely twisting yourself in knots trying to describe FOSS as anything but freely sharing public knowledge and resources: the exact motivation behind all leftist thought.
Is FOSS intended to enrich individuals from collective work? No? Then it’s not private property, and cannot be used as such, meaning it is not capitalist in any form.
The motivation behind leftist thought isn’t “freely sharing public knowledge and resources,” but “fighting injustice” (whatever that means). For some that means what you said, but for others that means increased central control and reliance on “experts” to structure society a certain way (i.e. “the end justifies the means”). It’s a broad spectrum of ideas.
Is FOSS intended to enrich individuals from collective work?
FOSS doesn’t care whether it’s used to enrich individuals or not, it’s just a license. Sometimes it’s used to enrich individuals, sometimes it’s used to give an alternative that doesn’t enrich individuals.
Which it is depends on project structure and licenses used. Some projects are designed to socialize costs without socializing ownership (see Mongo DB). Others are designed to also socialize ownership (e.g. Linux). It really comes down to project structure, not the specific license being used.
Leftism isn’t the same as socialism, socialism is a type of leftism.
The injustice socialists fight is largely economic injustice. And you’re right, that’s social ownership of the means of production. And no, that doesn’t mean “the public” necessarily (there are lots of forms of social), just some group democratically owns the means of production, whether that’s a company or an entire country.
Please read the rest of my previous comment. This isn’t a discussion on socialism, but FOSS. They’re two very different things.
That’s just not true. FOSS is an explicit grant of rights to my property to the public at large. There’s no compulsion to make my work public, and I can even keep my modifications to a FOSS project to myself and not share it. FOSS leaves me, the contributor, in control of what I want to do with my work. If I’m the sole contributor, I can even change the license that my work is in, I just can’t revoke previously released versions of the software.
In many cases, it makes more sense for companies to collaborate on a project than to build everything themselves. Look at Linux, most development comes from for-profit companies because distributing the burden of maintenance happens to be good for business. We see rival orgs like Huawei/Samsung, Intel/AMD, and RedHat/SUSE among the top contributors. They could keep those changes to themselves, but maintaining those changes long-term would cost more than the benefit they’d get from keeping them to themselves.
That’s just not true. I liked Reddit for years, but they slowly changed their model away from what worked for years. There were two directions they could’ve gone:
They picked the latter, so I left because that wasn’t the direction I wanted the platform to go. They can still make money off the IP and I have no problem with that, and if they chose a privacy-oriented approach, I would still be there. But they didn’t.
I’m also totally fine with them charging for API access, I’m not okay with the amount they charged (which was way more than they’d get from ads through their app).
Maybe if taking it to the extreme (i.e. FOSS always works better than the alternatives). But if taken situationally, I think it is totally a free capitalist mindset. For example, video games make a ton of sense being proprietary software, whereas game engines make a lot of sense being free software (or at least source-available, like Unreal Engine). In general, platforms are better as FOSS, whereas products are better as proprietary software. FOSS generally sucks for making products, proprietary software generally sucks for platforms because maintenance costs are so high.
You can absolutely take advantage of an explicitly leftist structure and use it for Capitalist gain in Capitalism, but that doesn’t make the structure Capitalist. It’s a rejection of Capitalism.
The enshittification of Reddit is precisely because it’s a Capitalist entity. It wasn’t as profitable to do what worked, so they made it worse and upped their profit margins. Not sure why you struggle to see that.
Thinking FOSS is better in some situations is devoid of being a Free-Market Capitalist stance, and is more leftist. Markets themselves are not Capitalist, by siding with FOSS, even in certain instances, you are saying leftist structures are better than Capitalist structures in certain instances. That’s more of a pro-market stance than a pro-Capitalism stance.
You’re tying Capitalism to a rejection of Capitalism, when that doesn’t make sense. You should just accept that you have some leftist views with regards to how the economy should be structured, rather than contort your worldview to make illogical connections. I’m not asking you to change your views, just accept correct labeling of them.
But it’s not leftist. Stallman certainly wanted it to be when he created the GPL, but it has worked incredibly well (and perhaps better) as a capitalist structure. It turns out, things like standards reduce costs overall, so you’ll get a better return on your capital by cooperating with others than keeping everything to yourself.
You can see this across the board. Most products are a derivative of other works, and being able to focus on your unique value proposition dramatically reduces costs and thus increases return on capital.
The whole notion of intellectual property is anti-capitalist, it’s government protectionism. Before IP laws were a thing, people built on each other’s innovations without restraint. Sometimes that lead to copycat works, and sometimes it lead to new works. IP law restricts derivative works, FOSS allows it, but puts limitations on them. I personally believe IP laws are one of the biggest hurdles to innovation and believe we should have much shorter patent and copyright duration to encourage more derivative works. FOSS is but one way to get around the current system.
No, it’s because the leadership is stupid.
There are other privacy-respecting, “capitalist” companies that do just fine, they just have a different profit model. However, it just so happens that the masses seem to prefer paying with data and ad time over money for services. I don’t, so I avoid ad-supported services, mostly because I think that runs counter to the type of content I want to see. Sometimes that means I use FOSS, and sometimes that means I use privacy-respecting proprietary software.
When I used Reddit, I paid for an ad-free, proprietary mobile app. I’d do the same today if Reddit allowed fair competition with its app. But they have decided that ads, data collection, and mass appeal are the direction they want to go.
I certainly believe that’s true, I just don’t think FOSS is inherently leftist. It’s a tool that works well both for capitalist and socialist interests, it has no economic or political bias.
Here are some areas where I think leftist structures are superior:
I absolutely do have some leftist views, in fact I’m probably more left than both major US parties, on net. The left/right spectrum isn’t as interesting to me as the liberty/authoritarian spectrum. I want government to be less involved in my life, and I don’t really care if the solutions that make that happen come from the left or the right. But to me, FOSS isn’t either, it’s just a way for me to decide how I want my work to be used by others.
Oh, but it is. Leftism is a rejection of hierarchy and individual ownership of the Means of Production, while FOSS is a rejection of ownertship. Again, you’re incorrectly tying Capitalist entities taking advantage of leftist products as a way to call the leftist products Capitalist. FOSS itself is leftist, regardless of who uses it.
IP is absolutely Capitalist, Capitalism is all about profiting off of ownership of property, as opposed to creating Value. Rent-seeking is built into Capitalism, that’s why it still exists, it consolidates power and influences the state. Believing Capitalism contains within itself the contradictions that work against itself is a leftist belief, after all!
Capitalist companies can certainly choose to make a better product, but that does not mean Reddit’s choice to pursue profit over a better product was not caused by Capitalism.
All in all, I really do think you need to understand that structures themselves can be left and used by right wing entities. FOSS is leftist itself and does not care who uses it, that does not make it Capitalistic if a Capitalist uses it.
But it’s not. If it was, I could relicense any GPL project to whatever I want because nobody owns it. The GPL is very interested in ownership, to the point where all contributors must agree to a license change or those contributions must be removed.
No, it’s about profiting off of capital. Property is one form of capital, though I reject the idea that IP is valid, I don’t believe anyone has an exclusive right to ideas. So my support of IP law in any form is purely pragmatic.
Basically, I derive rights from whatever could morally exist w/o a government w/o an initiation of force. In order for someone to take my real property, they would need to initiate force against me to deprive me of using it. In order for someone to use my intellectual property, they just need to see/hear it, and their use does not deprive me of using it, therefore no force.
So no, I reject the idea that IP has any moral foundation, it’s merely a structure governments use to encourage sharing of IP. FOSS is a community-driven way of achieving the same thing, just without the period of exclusivity. So IP law is a corruption of capitalism, not a feature of capitalism.
Sure, but it wasn’t inevitable. There are multiple ways to profit from a given class of product, and Reddit chose the one they thought would appeal to investors. I think that’s short-sighted and probably an indication that /u/spez is looking for an exist, not to build a quality product.
So I left. Reddit no longer appealed to me as a user, so I found something that works better for me. I actually started building my own, but Lemmy was “good enough,” so here I am. I’m still working on that project in my spare time, but not with the energy I once did. I don’t want to run a SM app, I just want something that works reasonably well. I left Facebook for Reddit for the same reasons.
I agree, I just disagree that it applies to FOSS.
For example, many co-ops are leftist because the structure is all about spreading out the ownership of the organization among the workers. Perhaps the most relevant is an HOA, is owned by the residents of the community, who elect representatives to make decisions for the whole. A lot of right-wing people develop and live in areas with an HOA as evidenced by the way suburbs tend to vote. So I agree with the premise, I just disagree that it applies to FOSS.
I have no problem using leftist or right-wing structures, neither is a particularly dirty word, provided it’s not a top-down structure. I reject authoritarianism, and I don’t particularly care about which economic systems are used to solve problems (e.g. I think georgism has a lot of value for real property, socialism is great for certain types of orgs, and capitalism should be the way our markets work in general). FOSS doesn’t really fall on that spectrum for me, it’s just a way to structure a contract between individuals for mutual gain.
But it is. FOSS is free and open source software, not Capitalist owned IP. Simple as.
Capitalism is many things, but primarily is rent-seeking off of owning Capital. I used the term property instead of Capital because we are talking about IP, but it’s nearly interchangeable.
You can’t support Capitalism without being a statist. Capitalism requires a monopoly on violence to exist.
The fact that Capitalism ruined Reddit yet that could have been avoided does not mean it isn’t the fault of Capitalism. That’s like saying someone shooting someone else to desth isn’t their fault, because the gun could have misfired.
Again, I really think you’re misunderstanding FOSS as a concept being different from FOSS as used by people.
That’s just not true. Capitalism is what happens when there is no force. Human nature is such that society would probably devolve into despotic states, but the economic system would likely still be capitalist.
Government prevents degrading into anarchy, and is a useful tool to prevent the worst of the bad outcomes (e.g. slavery, murder, etc).
You’ll even see capitalism existing within authoritarian situations, like prison, dictatorships, etc. It’s the default economic system people reach for.
But it does. Capitalism didn’t cause /u/spez to choose ads over a subscription model, that was his free choice. There are multiple viable profit models, and he chose one that I didn’t like.
Don’t blame the economic system, blame the CEO.
And I think you’re putting politics where it doesn’t belong.
FOSS isn’t inherently socialist, just like a tractor isn’t. It’s a tool, and it can be used to socialist and capitalist ends.
For example, the AGPL is frequently used to prevent competitors from effectively using a service, while also getting free contributions from the community. Those orgs often require signing over copyright for any contributions as well, so the work becomes the property of the company. At all points, the corporation has sole ownership of the source code. So who owns the “means of production” in this case? The corporation.
On the flipside, you have projects like Linux where contributors retain their own copyright and the software is essentially communally owned. So who owns the “means of production” in this case? The community as a whole.
It’s not the license that’s socialist, but the project management. FOSS is merely a grant to use, modify, and redistribute changes to a work owned by someone else. It’s not a grant to share in ownership, otherwise you wouldn’t have the limitations specified in the license.
Oh, you’re genuinely one of those people.
No, Capitalism isn’t what happens when there’s no force, that’s absurd. Capitalism requires a divide between Workers and Owners, which itself is forced hierarchy, and is upheld by a state. Government can be useful, yes, but Capitalism as an economic system is built on force.
You’re also twisting the quote around its original meaning, “don’t hate the player, hate the game,” when it would’ve been more accurate to keep it as is. “Don’t hate spez, hate Capitalism,” as Capitalism is what created the conditions and incentives for spez to make money via making Reddit shit.
FOSS is a tool with expressed non-ownership and a rejection of taking profit. If a hammer was free for everyone to use and anyone could clone it, that would be a leftist hammer too.
You’re trying really hard here, but given that you somehow think Capitalism is when you don’t have force means you really do need to go back to the drawing board.
I am amazed by your patience with this obvious troll.
But it doesn’t, owners and workers can be the same individuals. I am a worker in my 9-5 job, and an owner through my retirement plan based on stocks. There’s no class divide, just different roles.
Here’s a decent definition of capitalism:
This is the common definition of capitalism as near as I can tell, and nowhere in there is a monopoly on force required.
Saying capitalism requires a state is like saying socialism requires a state. You can have socialism within capitalism unless the state forbids it (e.g. co-ops and other forms of worker owner orgs), and you can probably have limited capitalism within socialism if the state permits it. They’re just different ways of producing goods, and both can exist without the state.
No, FOSS is a tool with expressed granting of rights, but not complete rights, to a work. If we restrict ourselves to “free software” (FOSS covers open source as well), you get the four freedoms: use, distribute, modify, and distribute modifications. That’s it, you don’t get full rights of ownership. Some FOSS licenses expand or reduce these freedoms, but we’ll stick with the FSF definition for now.
But that only matters if there’s a practical difference between ownership and non-ownership. With something like Linux, there are so many owners over various parts of the code that everyone practically has the same rights. However, with projects like MongoDB, all contributors sign over rights, so Mongo the company retains more rights than anyone else. You could call Linux “effectively socialist,” whereas that’s not true with Mongo.
FOSS explicitly doesn’t reassign copyright (i.e. ownership), so it cannot be social ownership. It’s individual ownership of parts of the means of a product and a grant of rights both for the product and (for copyleft licenses) future derivative works, so it’s more like a publicly traded company (shareholders are the contributors) than a cooperative…
But my point here is that FOSS isn’t an economic system, it’s a license grant, so comparing it to socialism or capitalism misses the point entirely.
How is that NOT rejecting ownership (in this context meaning private property)? Public ownership is by definition leftist.
A grant of rights is not ownership. If you own something, you can do whatever you want with it. If you’re granted rights to something, you are limited by the terms of the agreement.
For example, with the GPL, you are not allowed to use any (substantial) portion of the work in a propriety product. However, if you’re the author of that portion, you can.
Common ownership means everyone has the same rights related to the software. And that’s just not true for FOSS, though it can effectively be true for certain projects, provided there are enough authors. Linux is effectively commonly owned because getting every author to reassign ownership is infeasible, whereas that’s exactly not the case with MongoDB, where you sign over all copyright interest, so they completely own the work.
FOSS doesn’t require shared ownership, only shared rights, so it’s not socialist.
This all relies on a rather restrictive, and, I suspect, personally tailored definition of “ownership”. Common ownership simply means anyone can freely use something however they want. That is absolutely true of the vast majority of FOSS. And in this sense, shared rights amounts to the same as shared ownership.
Pointing out that it doesn’t allow you to cut off sharing sort of misses the forest for the trees. Of course public ownership demands the continuance of public ownership.
I think it’s a little more complicated than that. But the problem is, digital assets are quite different from physical ones, since I can easily modify a digital asset w/o impacting anyone else, whereas I cannot do the same with a physical good. The closest analogy here is a library, where I can take a book and do whatever I want with it. However, I need to return it to the library in a similar condition as I got it or I’d exclude others from using that asset in the same way I was able to use it. If I don’t, I’m usually prevented from borrowing other books until I replace the book (or the library waves the infraction). I don’t own library books, the library does, but I can freely use the books under the terms provided.
And that’s why I think IP is artificial. Copyright is only enforced by a central authority, whereas real property ownership can be enforced by the possessor without a central authority. So ownership of IP doesn’t mean the same as ownership of real property. W/o a central authority, nobody really owns IP, which kind of means everyone owns it, since everyone has full rights w/ regards to every work they can access. But with a central authority, ownership is defined by that authority based on whatever its copyright laws state. In the US, there’s a single owner for any work (can be a person or an organization), unless it’s placed in the public domain. In a socialist country, perhaps there’s no concept of IP for citizens of that country.
So the truly “socialist” IP model is public domain, which means everyone has equivalent rights to the work. However, that also means anyone can modify it and claim complete ownership over the modified work, excluding others from those improvements. FOSS works around this by requiring all modification to be licensed such that it preserves the four freedoms (again, focusing on the F part of that acronym), but it doesn’t grant actual ownership to others contributions, it merely provides a license to use them. But that isn’t communal ownership, it’s merely a common agreement among separate owners over a combined work.
That’s why I don’t see FOSS as socialist, capitalist, or any form of economic model, it’s just a way to force future versions of a product to remain under the same terms.
What exactly do you think capitalism and socialism are, dude? You’re absolutely twisting yourself in knots trying to describe FOSS as anything but freely sharing public knowledge and resources: the exact motivation behind all leftist thought.
Is FOSS intended to enrich individuals from collective work? No? Then it’s not private property, and cannot be used as such, meaning it is not capitalist in any form.
Capitalism and socialism are economic systems.
The motivation behind leftist thought isn’t “freely sharing public knowledge and resources,” but “fighting injustice” (whatever that means). For some that means what you said, but for others that means increased central control and reliance on “experts” to structure society a certain way (i.e. “the end justifies the means”). It’s a broad spectrum of ideas.
FOSS doesn’t care whether it’s used to enrich individuals or not, it’s just a license. Sometimes it’s used to enrich individuals, sometimes it’s used to give an alternative that doesn’t enrich individuals.
Which it is depends on project structure and licenses used. Some projects are designed to socialize costs without socializing ownership (see Mongo DB). Others are designed to also socialize ownership (e.g. Linux). It really comes down to project structure, not the specific license being used.
No further reading necessary.
Educate yourself. Socialism aims to put the means of production in the hands of the public. This is literally the public pooling of resources.
Stop embarrassing yourself.
Leftism isn’t the same as socialism, socialism is a type of leftism.
The injustice socialists fight is largely economic injustice. And you’re right, that’s social ownership of the means of production. And no, that doesn’t mean “the public” necessarily (there are lots of forms of social), just some group democratically owns the means of production, whether that’s a company or an entire country.
Please read the rest of my previous comment. This isn’t a discussion on socialism, but FOSS. They’re two very different things.