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!
If we take the words of Saint Richard Stallman as true in the sense that in his day all software developmet was ‘open’ but at some point some decided for whatever reason to start “closing” stuff then one could say all software development did not have any anarchist or communist intention in the beginning, it just turned profit-driven in the way.
I mean, it’s less about the intention and more about the reality of software development. Just because the developers back then didn’t chose to do software development in an anarchist way (although I think a lot of them had that kind of mindset), doesn’t mean, that they didn’t do it using anarchist principles.