This thought came to me in the shower today. Open source checks most of the boxes. It is a collaborative, worker owned (develloper-owned) project, that tries to flatten hierarchy. Especially if you look at something like Debian ), which really tries to have a bottom-up structure.
Of course, there are exceptions, considering there are a lot of corporate open-source projects, that are not democratically maintained and clearly only serve the interest of the company, who created it (like chromium for example).
So I am mainly talking about community-oriented FOSS projects here.
And if you were to agree with my statement, would you say that developing FOSS software is advancing the goals of the anarchist / communist project, because it is laying the groundwork infrastructure needed for a new kind of economy and society?
Thought this could be an interesting discussion!
No. I'm staunchly anti-communist and also a staunch supporter of free software. It's also possible to have another combination of beliefs on these things, but these are mine.
I suggest reading the section "Why Don't You Move to Russia?" of this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.en.html
I agree with that. Free software is about building a society more strongly based on individual rights. At least Marxism-Leninism certainly isn't about that, though anarchism can be argued to be to some extent.
Agreed. I am a hard GNU fan.