[AktiviX] Open source and anarchism: What can anarchists learn from the Free Software movement?

[Robin Green]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 02:04:37PM +0100, tomarmstrong at riseup.net wrote:
> Found this interesting piece on the enrager.net forums:
> 
> http://www.enrager.net/web/newswire/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=235

Thanks for the link.

Personally I'm not an anarchist and I don't think free software projects are
necessarily good examples of anarchist successes either. Two points:

1. Linus Torvalds is often described as a "benevolent dictator", with
a hierarchy of workers underneath him. Of course people can choose to get
their kernels from someone else who makes different decisions, but the fact
remains that the whole Linux kernel universe revolves around what technical
decisions Linus makes or assents to, because his kernel is the de facto
standard. And of course Linus isn't literally a dictator in the same sense as
Stalin was, which leads me on to my next point:

2. The model (whatever you want to call it) of a typical free software project
is quite restricted to just software production and doesn't apply to wealth-sharing,
decision making about other things, or wider social relations. It's really
rather limited. In other words, current free software production is often embedded
in capitalist societies, self-evidently, and therefore it's not very similar at all
to the "ideal anarchist (non-)state" which the original page implies is validated by
free software production (and which, incidentally, I claim can't exist, because of
law and order problems for one thing).

Cheers,
-- 
Robin