alt Hacker NewsI don't think Stallman is a communist. I'm a communist and initially I looked into it to learn more, but it's just a kind of techno-anarchism. The thing he misses is the thing that many (not all) anarchists miss: that there is a larger centralizing logic to capitalism that can't be resisted by small scale decentralized efforts and legal maneuvers. Rather, he does recognize the centralizing logic (the reason d'etre behind the GPL!) but I think it's become clear at this point that the general course of the evolution of the landscape has favored capitalist interests even though free and open source software has had a significant (and in many cases quite favorable) impact.
Free software gives people part of the means of production. In the 1980s/early-1990s model where personal computers were common but most software was run locally, it was an effective challenge to corporate interests, but since the evolution of robust networks and remotely processed software, it has ceased to be nearly as effective.
However, it's important to note that if free software ever truly challenged industrial interests, they would just get the laws changed to prevent it from restricting them in any real way using some bizarre legal maneuver. As it is, it is tolerable and produces useful products corporations can use for free. That's what it means to live under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
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Potato, potahto. I mean, I appreciate you putting in the effort to argue about precise categorization, but it is not terribly relevant to my perspective.
The fact is that he is just one more type of asshole who spends most of his time arguing about other people needing to work for free or requiring utopian collectivization of the work (process, output, etc.). The details are not essential because the idea is still the same: preferring the nebulous idea of collective freedom against individual freedom (and this includes moral corporations).
There is no centralizing characteristic to capitalism. It is, in fact, exactly the contrary and the main reason that what we call “capitalism” is the de facto system of exchange ever since humans evolved past primitive needs. Capitalism relies on self-interest to function, and there is no central entity. One could argue about the government and the money supply control as a central entity, but it's actually not a requirement, just a convenience. If government money becomes untrustworthy, you just switch to using something else as a medium of exchange (often other moneys or precious metals). On the other hand, communism absolutely requires centralization and violence/coercion to force people to comply. I have no idea how you can jump to the conclusion that capitalism is centralizing when it's absolutely the reverse.
As for the free software and the parallel to possessing the means of production in communism, it is very interesting because it basically disproves the whole theory without much effort.
Software development is a field where the capital requirements to get started are extremely low, yet hardly any people with access to this capital have been able to produce value, both at the individual level and group/business level. Clearly it is not enough to be able to access the capital and all the tools for free.
What's more, all of this is only possible because there are some other people working on things that allow software development to even exist. Those things are entirely dependent on the capitalist system. Thinking you can build a “free utopia” on top of a capitalist system is delusional and extremely dumb.
I can't argue all day, but at this point I really don't understand how some people who are not very young anymore can still believe in the bullshit of communism and its derivatives. I don't really care per se, but the problem is the moral posturing and constant activism of those communists. If their stuff was any good, they wouldn't need to spend all day trying to convince productive people to buy into their utopia.
The primary Stallman’s output is neither technical nor legal but moral. He condemns any entity that doesn’t grant its users four “freedoms.” And the primary disease that GPL spreads is not arbitrary legal restrictions but the moral code (altruism) that sanctions it. The fact that it’s not meant to be forced upon developers is irrelevant: it preserves the philosophy that could be weaponized in the future, possibly in an altered form.
But yeah, altruism is typically shared by both anarchists and communists. The only remaining question seems to be: who better embodies the ideal?