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!
I used to think so. It’s ideologically sound except for allowing corporations the same free use as anyone else. There are plenty of forward thinking people who would never want to support the oppressive evil of massive technology corporations and would never intentionally help them. Then they publish free software and directly help them anyway. It’s not a coincidence that most “free” software is funded by the US tech industry who is directly benefited from it. I’m not sure of a way to change it that would help regular people faster than it helps private industry crush regular people.