> I've long held that open source is one of the world's biggest anarchist experiments. Anarchism, as understood by the likes of Kropotkin, largely believed that we can self organize towards working for the wellbeing of all, that s self organized groups will genuinely build useful and high quality tools.

The paradox of this kind of "anarchism" is that it works really well when it isn't being consciously pursued, i.e. when the "well being of all" is an emergent effect of people pursuing their own well being locally, trying to speculate about "the well being of all" at the macro level. The moment people start trying to consciously work toward specific outcomes at the macro level, it all starts to fall apart.

So it's really more aligned with Hayek than Kropotnik: spontaneous order as a product of human action, not human design.

> Why do we need to pay open source developers? They need housing, food, etc. Maybe the better answer is to figure out how to make those things freely available to open source developers.

And that's exactly where we begin to falter. Sitting here on HN speculating about how to make the world, as a single unit of analysis, rather people at the micro level observing and replicating what actually works in practice individually, is a recipe for creating obstacles and mechanisms of centralization which will inevitably be abused.