This thought came to me in the shower today. Open source checks most of the boxes. It is a collaborative, worker owned (develloper-owned) project, that tries to flatten hierarchy. Especially if you look at something like Debian ), which really tries to have a bottom-up structure.
Of course, there are exceptions, considering there are a lot of corporate open-source projects, that are not democratically maintained and clearly only serve the interest of the company, who created it (like chromium for example).
So I am mainly talking about community-oriented FOSS projects here.
And if you were to agree with my statement, would you say that developing FOSS software is advancing the goals of the anarchist / communist project, because it is laying the groundwork infrastructure needed for a new kind of economy and society?
Thought this could be an interesting discussion!
While I agree, that Marxism-Leninism or Russian-Style "communism" have nothing to do with free software, I would also not call them real communism. Marx litteraly defined communism as a classless, stateless society. There is no such thing as a communist state. I also would argue, that free software is fundamentally anti-capitalist, because it rejects the basis of capitalism, which is private ownership of the means of production (which in this case would be software). So, in my opinion you cannot simultaneously believe that capitalism is the best way to organize software development while believing that free software is the best way to organize software development.
No, it doesn't. Companies developing software for internal use, including as part of a "means of production" (e.g. robot firmware at a factory), and keeping it secret from the public is completely compatible with free software. It's only when software is distributed to other people/entities that the free software movement insists that the recipient should also have freedom (including to run a business with it or any modified version of it).
Are you shure about that? Because that would mean, that every piece of software, that hasn't been released to the public would automatically be free software, which would make the label pretty meaninglessness.
No, every piece of software, that hasn’t been released to the public, does not need a license. So there is no need to talk about free software, because that is a decision you make (sometimes made for you if you modify a GPL piece of software) when you release to the public.
Yes. There are several sections on gnu.org that talk about this, these are the ones I was able to quickly find.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html