A Commons of Software Productive Infrastructure, by and for Capital

marewolf.me

17 points·simonmic··2 comments

Puh, this is very shallow. "There is a growing call for sustainable open source, non-profits, and adjacent organisations that appears to align with the very strong culture of radical anti-capitalist organising and contribution in either free or open source software projects" - where is the source for that? Not everythying that this open is "anti-capitalist", and for sure not "radical anti-capitalist". The two examples given (NixOS and Rust) are particularly bad examples.

"The ideology of free software has failed to substantially deliver freedom in consumer software" - this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what free software is about. This has been discussed a lot, and I want to remind us of the "don't contribute to open source" debate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nY_cy8zcO4

While the authors position is rather far from grounded and misses the key issue, which in my estimate is that "Radical Anti-Capitalists" went wrong with alienating productive members of software society in favour of pandering to fringe and populist politics unrelated to those fundamental and crucial in pursuit of ensuring freedom and digital rights.

Free software is indeed about freedom in consumer software. You're strongly suggesting that it is otherwise without providing any clarity or context. What gives?

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