Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)
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
rant:
I have been using Linux since 2006, a lefty and against the super-rich and big corporations since I remember (to the point of avoiding their products like the plague), also never having understood or accepted gender roles and other stupid traditional concepts, yet never turned into a communist 🤷
It baffles me that so many people think that respecting gender equality, understanding the evil in big corporations and avoiding them, valuing community and being tolerant (except for intolerance) and against discrimination somehow equals communism… I say this because I’ve been called a communist by many people who know me, while I have always rejected it explicitly!
/rant
Sounds a lot like me. That’s not communism, that’s just being a decent person. One that respects others and just wants everyone to live a good life without being the target of hate and harassment.
That’s overlapping with communism.
Yeah, I love the FOSS philosophy and I would be a communist if I didn’t know that in my country and in every other country where communism is/was, it became a dictatorship doing reallly horrible things. I simply don’t have the trust in people to believe communism is possible without violation of human rights. It’s sad.
in every other country where communism is/was
There is not a single country that has achieved communism.
Sorry then, I should have written In every other country ruled by communists saying they are building communism, banning every other political party then the communist one, killing people in the name of communism. I see their unability to achieve communism even when they’ve had full control over country for decades as a proof of that it’s not really possible.
It is incorrect to say that there was/is communism in the country. There are only countries that trying/tried building communism.
In every other country ruled by communists saying they are building communism, banning every other political party then the communist one, killing people in the name of communism
Having a single party is the one of several approaches. But the only one that survived. I think the idea is that you don’t need other parties if you building communism (like why do you need any liberal party driven by rich people?). And It’s not like regular people can’t join this party (unlike now when only rich people can be in politics).
proof of that it’s not really possible.
I’m not saying that it’s possible, but I wouldn’t say that it’s impossible given a certain level of technology.
Then what is it? A teapot in the sky?
If it’s a viable plan which can be realized, then how to achieve it, without killing people and creating a dictatorship? Is it possible?I might be wrong, but it seems to me that any effort to establish communism will eventually fail with a lot paid in vain, and many lives lost, as has happened so far.
If that viable plan needs time to be accepted more widely, then maybe we should simply wait and try to be decent people in the meantime, instead of trying now to establish a “temporary” dictatorship actively as a way of “transition”. And if the plan can be acted upon right now, then again the question is how (without resorting to violence and tyranny, of course). That question remains open to me. And it’s a big one.
Then what is it? A teapot in the sky?
In such countries there was/is socialism. They only tried/trying to build communism. This is a common misconception.
If it’s a viable plan which can be realized, then how to achieve it, without killing people and creating a dictatorship? Is it possible?
I don’t know. But I doubt that the state will give up its powers without any fight.
Looks like you have a lot to learn
Thanks for your valuable input, you opened my eyes.
Fuck communist statist, foss is pure anarchism.
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.
Eh, depends on the project
sudo apt-get install anarchismI now love Debian more than I previously thought possible.
brb installing Debian on all my hardware.
edit: there’s a
fortune-anarchismtoo, amazing.
AUR package: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/anarchism
(the pkgbuild is literally just extracting the deb and archiving it again to an arch package lol)
Linus Torvalds is a “full-blown woke communist”? Citation needed.
I have been a FOSS enthusiast since my preteen or early teenage years (mid-to-late 2000s), yet I am not in any sense a communist.
His dad was a straight up member of the Finnish Communist Party. He’s still alive, and is even a member of the European Parliament, but seems more liberal/centrist these days.
Linus himself seems to be pretty mum on politics.
To me it always seemed like Linus Torvalds is mostly a pragmatist.
Richard M Stallman on the other hand…
He made a comment sarcastically and replied to an accusation labeling himself as such
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.
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.
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?
I agree, FOSS not only appeals to communists but also to the most extreme libertarians.
Everyone acting in their own selfish interests, using the code they need and writing code to scratch their itch. Forking when they want.
The idea of a fork (I’m not happy, I’m going to do my own thing) is absolutely not a communist concept. Communism is usually centralized planification.
Ikr it’s really more like anarcho-syndicalism
Lost of syndicalists see themselves as communists. Including myself. I’ve been on the board, on the administration team and the negotiatiok team for my syndicalist union. All communism isn’t leninism.
Many will scream ‘but FLOSS is political’. In fact the opposite is true! FLOSS is a reaction against the political imposition called Intellectual Property. It is ANTI-political!
Actions done in relation to politics are political. That’s how it works. If someone is against the motivation of an economic system or a state, that is politically driven.
Just as you are against socialism is political, being against proprietary software is as well.
Reaction to the status quo, both against or for, is inherently political.
There are two ways for humans to interact: voluntarily, with consent, permission, through agreement and contract OR through force, coercion, mandation & compulsion.
Politics employs the later. When the former is violated it can require self-defence. FLOSS is a legal (not political) self-defence.
It is what Free Market economist Hayek called ‘Spontaneous Order’. You can either have free spontaneous order as evidenced in a libre market and voluntary interaction OR controlled chaos as evidenced in governments with their IP, as well as socialist aspiring Communists societies.
What do you mean by foss being orderless? Wouldn’t this concept be more associated with the development structure of each project?
The power of spontaneous order! ipencil ipencil
I too just turned into a Marxist after finding out about Linux and software freedom in 2020 lol
I think there might be more than a handful of us. Welcome, comrade.
🫡
Literally same, even the years match up lol
Me too
Shit this is too accurate
Ironic as I went the other way. I was a Communist when I got into FOSS and as I got older I realized I could never defend the historical record of Communism.
** record of authoritarians that called themself communist.
nOt rEaL cOmMunIsM
You do get that Bad People don’t usually label themselves as such right? It would be like the Nazi party (unironically) labelling themselves as the Fascist Genocidal Aryan Elite Supremacists Party instead of National Socialist German Workers Party.
How many people do you think would support fascist, genocidal dictators if they outed themselves as such to begin with?
I agree on that, but that doesn’t mean that those who outed themselves aren’t communists. They were communists, and all of the attempts at a communist system has failed horrifically. I say this as a person who lives in a ex-communist country.
You’re not more Communist than Lenin. Read his letters and works (they’ve been translated to English) and tell me that’s not a man who truly believes in the things Marx said.
I think if we cooperate like our gentle cousins the Bonobos for a century or two we’d basically have Star Trek. Instead we (Americans) are spending 3x the cost of housing the homeless on hostile architecture and armed goons to raid/destroy their camps with the aim of making our metally ill & vulnerable as invisible as possible- while we slaughter animals we know are able to suffer & grieve as powerfully as any of our beloved dogs, en masse, at absurd environmental cost, washed and neatly sealed from any evident cruelty so they can be consumed or spoil, 50/50 with hardly a thought.
The concept of cooperation transcends any flawed man. We can do better than this but continuing to enable the psychopaths that got us here seems beyond impractical.
I think if we cooperate like our gentle cousins the Bonobos for a century or two we’d basically have Star Trek.
Bonobos are limited in their geographic reach to a small area in the Congo. They might not be the best model for how humans should behave. Even if they’re relatively peaceful, they still are highly territorial and will engage in warfare if needed. And if we lived in that manner we likely wouldn’t be able to support a population much higher than them (10-30k per million sq miles depending on the estimates you’re looking for). There’s about 25 million square miles of habitable land on the planet so we’d have a global population of 750k people so we’d have to kill of roughly 8.01 billion people to accomplish this goal.
The concept of cooperation transcends any flawed man. We can do better than this but continuing to enable the psychopaths that got us here seems beyond impractical.
The concept of cooperation is at the core of the modern western society too. It’s at the core of any society really.
We can do better than this but continuing to enable the psychopaths that got us here seems beyond impractical.
I think the record of Communism shows that it has the same ability to enable psychopaths without the means to minimally keep them in check.
** Record of authoritarians that called themself communist. How little you think of us, believing this is the best we can do. Please get in touch if a time comes when you’re ready for an honest conversation.
I’ve been nothing but honest. I think Lenin interpreted Marx’s teachings and works largely correctly and implemented a revolution and sate based on that understanding. I believe Mao interpreted Marx correctly and built a state based on that interpretation.
I think the critical flaw of Communism is that it lacks the ability to self critique. Instead of something like the “USSR failed to achieve Communism because of X, Y and Z which we can correct by changing…” it says “those weren’t in any fashion even tangentially related to Communis, anyway let’s do exactly what they did again…” Comversley, other forms of governments don’t require such religious undertows and can support significant disagreement and discussion on how to build a society.
“I’ve been nothing but honest.”
Oh, see when I saw 80% of your reply explaining why literally being bonobos wouldn’t be helpful I got the wrong impression. Isolated this reply sounds more serious but, addresses assertions I never made.
We can incorporate self critique more easily than ever with the internet. Blockchain perhaps, since I’m not even sure whether or not I’m arguing with a time wasting ai, lol.
Communism isn’t about exegesis. It’s not about who understands the source texts or believes in the correct unadulterated virgin idea. There are many schools of communism and they have all changed with history in some way.
I feel called out.
I’m not quite there yet but im definitly at the second to last block
Welcome comrade
🫡
So many kiddos arguing ridiculous politics here.