this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Programs and infrastructure people built for a reason, and those reasons are always political. Everything is political. Even the very internet system you use being open to the public and the world is a result of some political decisions decades ago, nevermind FOSS.
Gates once called Linux communism and yeah, he was right. FOSS is the closest thing to practicable communism.
It's a route of exploitation. FOSS developers aren't often paid for their labor, and what they produce is often commodified by capital. Products of people's leisure are exploited basically, and they justify it through this moral framework, but no class dynamics are impacted and actually the opposite, they become reified even more.
If Linux or foss had the ability to impact political economy in some communist way we'd have seen it by now, so this is like a deus ex machina myth for tech hobbyists to elevate themselves, an evangelical tech religion. As a Marxist myself this stuff just makes me laugh, the irony of a creature like Bill Gates calling something communist and embracing it with pride.
If you want to put faith in technology and the internet changing the world for the better, just realize since the dawn of all this stuff wealth inequality and economic stresses have only increased until a full blown crisis in 2008 of the consenting economic model. Now as these stresses turn inward we see it culminating in what we might call neofascism.
Capitalism subsumes, that's no surprise and that's a function of it, it's nothing specific to technology, you can buy Das Kapital at amazon.com now and you could buy it in a book shop run by capitalists before. Disco Elysium while fiction - has excellent commentary on this as well when it comes to critiques.
Technology is value agnostic, more obvious than ever with information age era tech, but at least in my experience, it has done way more good than bad, I don't think I'd be alive without the internet honestly and the efforts of FOSS and the culture of information sharing and all of it has been to the detriment of both cultural and capital control.
The thought that I'd pay for media is something scary and otherworldly, the thought I'd be gatekept from accessing certain information instead of just being able to find info I'd be dead without.
Just as income inequality has widened (which is not as a consequence of any specific technology anyway turn of the 20th century was far worse) , and the reactionaries get more brazen, we see global class consciousness on a scale previously unseen and the openness of the average person to progressive ideas and critiques of the establishment.
Gates didn't embrace Linux, MS did after him and their "embrace,extend,extinguish" approach failed massively, for every FOSS project that gets taken over by capital there are so many more that don't and can't.
We're on one right now, I would like to believe. Time will tell of course. But your doomerism while entertaining is counterproductive. I think it's okay to be indifferent, but to actually actively advocate FOSS as politically useless is just doing the capitalists' demoralization for them.