Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)
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.
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% :(
deleted by creator
Just when I thought I couldn’t admire him more…
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 😮
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.
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.
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.
That’s why no country has achieved communism they are all authoritarian!
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.
Yes, Communism fails to acknowledge human psychology and will therefore never work. People are individuals with self interests. This can never be controlled (without violence) by a socialist/communist society. The good news is you only need selfishness in a free market society. In order for people to get their needs met they need to offer value. Value exchange means all people are better off (on average).
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.
I do too. To be clear, I did NOT mean that we could go without it today. What I meant was that if we didn’t have it to start with, things would’ve likely still developed albeit much more slowly.
I’ll also preface this by saying I definitely slightly misread everything before and so my reply was kinda crappy
What I meant was that if we didn’t have it to start with, things would’ve likely still developed albeit much more slowly.
I dont think we will ever know, but Im not sure I agree. I dont know what the landscape would look like without relying on open source and patent theft. A lot of the stuff would probably not be financially viable.
The counter point would be - with only state protectionism in the form of IP the crony-capitalist sector would monopolise and dominate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
ITT: people who have no idea what communism is
welcome comrade!Fine, but dont defend tyranical regimes. They are bad no mather who they say they read. They could could claim to be following the teachings of fucking Mr Roggers but if they have concentration camps then thats not utopic or very humanitarian in my opinion, specially if ther is some mad dictator in power with everything no matter how manny extra steps are in between.
On Lemmy? Shock
Seriously. I just can’t escape. I think it’s nice to have people who support xism while also having people that support yism and zism, as it creates a healthy environment where we can discuss things throughly; since each member will see, recognize, and interpret what they see differently and possibly contribute more.
Vast majority of Lemmy users are in the same demographic which barely provides differing opinions so there’s basically nothing to discuss (apart from things do not sit well with said demographic).
I really do hope this platform somehow attracts users from every ideology much like Tildes.
https://moneyinc.com/linus-torvalds-net-worth/
How Linus Torvalds Achieved a Net Worth of $150 Million
Red Hat and VA Linux went public, and since they acknowledged it would not have been possible without the programmer, Torvalds received shares reportedly worth $20 million. Before it went public, Red Hat had allegedly paid Torvalds $1 million in stock, which the programmer claims was the only big payout he received.
He revealed that the rest of the stock Transmeta and another Linux startup awarded him were not worth much by the time he could sell them. However, in the case of his Red Hat stock, it must have been worth his while because, in 2012, Red Hat became the first $1 billion open-source company when it reached the billion-dollar mark in annual revenue.
Whether he exercised his stock options is unclear, but the money he makes from the gains could be the reason why his net worth has continued to soar.
Well, that’s one definition of being communist, I suppose. Myself, I think that it’s fairly safe to say that Torvalds is okay with private ownership of industry.
People may have read this and got too excited. He just believes in socially left policy. He’s probably not a communist.
I don’t know about his political views, but I think Linus deserves every last penny he got from Red Hat.
Tell me you haven’t read the Communist Manifesto without telling me you haven’t read the Communist Manifesto.
I’m no communist, but your argument is flawed.
Linus is not representative of the Linux community and I think the famous Stallman rant regarding GNU/Linux is actually relevant here.
The free software movement is certainly pretty left leaning, though I wouldn’t call them communist.
now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)
OP’s words.
Mr. Parenti, are you a Marxist?
Parenti: This is my answer. I would wear that label proudly if I knew that you understood what I meant by Marxist. And when someone says: ‘You’re a Marxist now aren’t you?’ and their only intention is to give a buzzword which says ‘this guy drinks the blood of capitalist children’ or something, then I’m going to say no, I’m not your label, I don’t particularly want your label.
[…] Look, I wrote the book about the media. I don’t know what Karl Marx has to say about 20th-century US media, I think he had very little to say because you know… he left early. But there’s been a lot of creative thought and scholarship in Marxist literature and I feel that it’s a scholasticist thing [to say]: ‘Oh, you took your [Marxist] formula and applied it here…’
See, I don’t see these things this way because I’m a Marxist. it’s just the opposite. I started seeing these things and I started realizing that there was an analysis that had explanatory power for that. It gets very frustrating you know. For years I’d knock myself out trying to make an analysis, I’d come to the conclusion and I’d say: ‘Hey you know, the police are not neutral, they’re on the side of property and power.’ Then someone would say to me: ‘That’s Marxism, you know, you’re sounding like a Marxist.’
That’s Marxism… oh. Then I’d say: 'Wealth is largely unaccountable in many of the things it does in our democracy, I don’t understand, that isn’t what I learned … ’ / ‘Oh that’s a Marxist point of view, Marx said that you know.’ and it would go on, one thing after another and I said:
‘Boy, this Karl Marx was really something, you know, every time I put two and two together and come up with an analysis they give him the credit for it.’
it’s a reference to something linus said
https://news.itsfoss.com/linus-torvalds-woke-communists/
https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWSXomDbvdxKgOxVAm
There’s a gaping and dangerous misunderstanding in there. Having money or being successful under capitalism doesn’t mean you don’t see its flaws. The idea that rich people can’t be communists is like saying that only gay people can support gay rights.
Believing that the world would be a better place if we pooled our resources has nothing to do with whether you created an operating system that all of global computing relies on.
I don’t even think the meme is about communism as much as it is just venting about how corps turned free-software into the panopticon it is today.
But Idc if Torvalds is a Marxist bc I’m not either, but marx wrote about how the proletariat should own stocks, so that isn’t even disqualifying tho.
And tbh I think most “marxists” just adopt that term because our political discourse is so corrupted that anyone who thinks that we shouldn’t curb-stomp an Amazon employee for wanting a bathroom break is treated like they’re Mao anyway.
I had to look up the panopticon reference, so I thought to share with others: ‘A proposed prison of supervision, so arranged that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times without being seen by them: proposed by Jeremy Bentam.’
I feel called out.
I’m not quite there yet but im definitly at the second to last block
If you’d like to discuss the subject, there are many comms on a handful of instances where people would be happy to!
Part of how I got here involves reading an assload of textfiles from the '90s and growing disillusioned with the fruits of that optimistic '90s techno-libertarianism
Fuck communist statist, foss is pure anarchism.
My
brother in ChristComrade in the revolution, Communism is a stateless, moneyless, classless society. Whatever self-proclaimed “Statist Communists” thare are, are no-more Communist than the National “Socialists” who sent our kind to the death camps.The end stage of the dialectic is that, yes. But that’s doesn’t just appear from nothing. Read state and Revolution or What is to be done.
But that’s doesn’t just appear from nothing.
Yea I think that’s kinda their point
Personally while I think all states should be abolished and all resources should be shared on a global scale, I also think that the company that serves my house with Internet should be forced to compete so that we (the people in my city) can get the benefits of capitalism: improved prices and service.
I also believe that the latter is actually a step towards the former - though it’s just a guess.
Anarchism does not necessarily exclude Communism! :)
Good Explanations: https://www.anarchistfaq.org/afaq/index.html for those interested
If only communism could function under voluntarism.
FLOSS is Voluntaryism - it only requires voluntary participation.
Disagree. If FOSS were an anarchism what would be the point of FOSS lincences of which some are very long legal documents? Also corporations would just take your code, say its theirs and tell you to go fuck yourself.
Foss licenses are copyleft, they bar individuals from enclosing the commons built by the collective for profit. Anarchism isn’t just letting people do whatever they want. Anarchism means against hierarchy. Having rules that prevent unjustified hierarchies from forming is entirely with in the bounds of anarchism. Including rules that prevent using copyright as a coercive hierarchy.
All heirarchies are unjustified.
I’d look at foss licenses more as tools of defence against (and within) the current system/context than “rules” that serve to enforce some kind of anti-capitalist “heirarchy”.
Copyleft is NOT against profit! Go read Stallman! Anarchy mean ‘No Rulers’ not no hierarchy. Call yourself an Anorderist otherwise! Hierarchy is just a form of structure. Some people have management and coordination skills. Others specialise in an area that fits into a greater project. There is nothing wrong in a voluntary structure system. It is only the initiation of force upon structure (see. Government) or otherwise that is a problem.
Honest question: “Without any authority who gets to enforce the rules?”. Everyone, as they see fit it seems. What makes “your” hierarchy better than “my” hierarchy?
Everyone sort of enforces the rules as they see fit now. The difference is there is an expectation to not resist when someone is abusing their power because they are an authority figure. Under anarchism, it is your peers holding each other accountable, and your right to question actions against you is accepted.
I look at it the other way. In a free and prosperous armed society where common sense rules are respected and insisted upon by the majority who would be stupid enough to break the rules? Let us look at it some other ways. Ebay is one of the largest merchant structures in the world. It is not an authority, but has for decades now used in-house arbitration for disputes. Detroit has a private ‘police force’. It is not an authority. It is a private defence org that also runs a volunteer community protection unit that uses psychology as its main policing tool. Historically we had Panarchy in Ireland. People regardless of territory could voluntarily join a tuath. It would offer legal services. If unsatisfactory the client could join another tuath. Even today way much more is spent on private security than on policing. Maratine law orignally ran on banishment. Did not pay your contract or larder bill. You could no longer dock your ship or be served at a tavern etc. Before the state co-opted the law, there was Common Law! Law does not require authority.
Tell me you don’t understand anarchism without telling me you don’t understand anarchism.
Communism is when government does something. Anarchism is when you do fuck all to protect yourself.
Government is when an involuntary institution has a mafia protection racket. They show up after a crime and write a report. Anarchism is when you take responsibility for your own protection.
How so?
It seeks to undermind the corrupt copywrite systems and promotes decenteralizrd collaberation and cooperation.
Eh, depends on the project
FOSS is Ricks group from The Walking Dead
Ironically yes, somewhat, since TWD suffers from the writers’ liberal biases.
What? These things are not related to each other by a good margin. In fact, since the FOSS is completely orderless, it goes against communism; which requires some sort of order just to be able to function. But either way, the parallel is not there or questionable at best, not to mention irrelevant.
Can we NOT drag useless politics into FOSS?
For me, it was around 2015ish when I first installed Linux after learning about it from someone that was detasselling in a corn field with me. Then around 2017-2020ish, I eventually became radicalized (2017 is when net neutrality was killed, even though around 80% of Americans supported it, which made me question our government and economy).
democratized private ownership and made it serve our community.
Isn’t that what communism is? In an ELI5 level?
I am not sure if you meant to reply to the other person’s comment or refer to them in mine, but I think this video does a pretty good job at explaining socialism/communism to people wanting to understand it: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=fpKsygbNLT4
I’ll try to give my own explanations later.
Yeah sorry. I have replied to the wrong comment. Thanks for the video link BTW.
Second Thought is so good!
I think we may be the same person.
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
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
Guy’s Finnish. The chances of him being actually communist are pretty much zero.
