People say capitalism is efficient, yet Twitter has around 5,OOO employees while Mastodon was built pretty much single handedly by Eugene Rochko. Today, Mastodon provides a strictly superior user experience with only a handful of contributors.
Majority of effort at Twitter is directed towards things like ads and tracking that are actively harmful from user perspective. Meanwhile, the core functionality of the platform that benefits the users can be implemented with a small fraction of the effort.
Seems to me that capitalism is actually far more inefficient than open source development in practice.
It surprises me how many people in the open source community are libertarians when open source embodies so many traits of humans interactions under socialism. Not to mention the absurd amount those people criticize capitalist practices in software just like Twitter but never take it a step further.
Yeah I find it weird as well. I love to use open source as an example of how things can work outside capitalism. It shows that you don’t need profit as a motivator for people to participate and that effort can be organized organically from bottom up instead of needing a business owner to direct it. It’s a really great example of communism working in the wild.
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Its also a source of profound wealth transfer upwards. All of FAANG but moreso the web companies are built on foundations of a billion lines of non-AGPL code they could use for profit.
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Do you have examples of FAANG relying on open-source code (especially ones they did not build themselves like chromium, angular, react, etc)? Perhaps jasmine is one …
These are just a few examples off the top of my head. There are many more.
To be clear, there are plenty of libertarian socialists as well, and “libertarian” used to mean “anarchist” before it was deliberately co-opted by the semi-Objectivist, right wing-style libertarians of the Libertarian Party in the 1970s.
Yeah you’re right I should’ve clarified that I meant right-libertarians.
Why do you assume libre software is not aligned with libertarian values? libertarians are against copyright and so is libre software.
I specified below that I should’ve clarified that I meant right-libertarians since yes FLOSS can apply to libertarian philosophies of freedom. It can even apply to right-libertarians, but I feel like they’re misguided since FLOSS is pretty antithetical to qualities of capitalism. Also FLOSS requires a collective effort to create, maintain, and spread while right-libertarian philosophy is grounded in individuals and individual freedom.
Libertarianism is not against collective action.
Further you are incorrect to imply that floss requires collective action. Software development scales down with efficiency when it comes to numbers. The most efficient system would be single developers working on small single programs that can connect to each other - and that’s what UNIX philosophy is.
Finally invidualism and invidual freedom is completely compatible with cooperation as long as those freedoms are respected and with Libre software that’s indeed the case. You can drop off a community, fork the project and continue on your own. In other words the community does not control the project.
You’re right I was incorrect and made some assumptions in that comment. Thanks for pointing them out and correcting them. I think I abstracted away from FLOSS software too much and didn’t actually connect my qualms with right-libertarianism with software.
No problem!
I think the beauty of libre software is that it can work well in many different systems and we see it in action all around the world from cryptocurrencies which are very libre and very libertarian (see Bitcoin) or very socialist (see Tezos for example), to linux kernel which is very capitalistic and finally to fediverse which is very much socialistic and community driven.