Linux

I was leftie before I was techie. If you don't know anything around tech and computers you wouldn't know what to do. Even as a fairly tech-adjacent professional it took me quite a while.

Then again, I only became a real leftie again after kicking all the corpos out of my computer.

Tech used to be (and still is) obscured by heavy gatekeeping. We who understand a little more like to joke about those who don't, and I guess we'll have to stop that if we really want to unite the left. Don't ridicule, explain. The person might never have had a chance to learn the concept.

As a linux leftie, I fully agree. It’s hard to convince people though. Also, I don’t necessarily think it’s the best intro to leftism for layfolk. It’s a great into to leftism for tech nerds and a great intro to tech for left nerds, but the punk who just uses the library computer doesn’t care. Unions are often the easiest intro to leftism for people and not many union folks are interested in learning free software.

I was out drinking the other day and an IBCW friend introduced me to a union brother of his and they’re smart guys who believe in the power of labor, hell they even excitedly showed me that there’s a professionals union in the AFL-CIO, but if I tried to explain a terminal to them they’d look at me like I grew several heads at once.

Free software is great praxis, but it often suffers by the fact that it isn’t what people are used to. That there are intro free softwares like GIMP, libreoffice, and basically anything where FOSS is the default. We can do this, but I think it’s definitely going to not be the easiest sell.

It’s pretty hard to fight hegemony when your salary is just built on donations. A lot of important tech is also paid for via government grants then the private sector gets to use it and erect the walled gardens when it should be in the commons.

Yes, open source software often requires funding and corporate support because we live in a primarily capitalist society. That doesn't make it capitalist itself.

And I think the freedom foss offers is socialist - it necessitates cooperation, it's open for all to see and contribute to, and the idea of ownership is very loose. It doesn't matter what the political motivation is.

That phrase that you said has absolutely nothing to do with the Linux/Libre philosophy.

You take care of your self and scratch your own itch

While I understand that you meant to make an analogy with people creating the projects they want to use, the vast majority of people don't create their projects, and instead contribute to others, and they contribute with existing issues not necessarily things that they want or need. Alternatively you can see that a lot of issues are fixed by people who are not affected by it, it's very common for issues to ask people to test specific changes to see if they solved the issue they were facing.

and you should not be a liability to the society

The vast majority of people just use the software that the community maintains, and when they need a feature they open a PR and let the community implement it. So the vast majority of people are a liability to the community, even if you contribute to one project actively you use several others that you've never contributed to.

but make your self useful and contribute back.

This has nothing to do with right-wing philosophy, in fact most right wing people are against any form of contribution,

And I think this is kind of the reason FLOSS works well, it can be aligned with many philosophies.

You might not like it, but FLOSS is extremely aligned with left wing ideology, where people contribute to the community because they want to and the community provides back without asking anything in return.