this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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Free and Open Source Software

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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!

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[–] DeckPacker@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 hours ago

That was indeed a really interesting read! It really made me think more deeply about software licencing. I didn't quite understand what the authors problem with GPLv3 was though? That the companies are scared of it? Isn't that kind of a good thing? I don't want amazon to make massive profits off of my work, because if that's possible to do, then that would necessarily mean, that my goal as a developer (to protect my work from exploitation while helping the common good) isn't working. I am curious what you have taken away from the essay though? How do you protect your code from corporate exploitation?