by onpon4 » Fri Apr 05, 2013 17:22
Honestly, I find people's mental association of "open source", and free software by extension, with Communism... disturbing, though I know they're usually just joking.
Free software (where "free" refers to freedom, not price) fits very well any libertarian philosophy, capitalist or socialist. On the libertarian socialist/anarcho-communist side, freedom with software allows people to cooperate on software development. But on the right libertarian/anarcho-capitalist side, free software creates a free market of support; if you have a problem which needs to be solved right away, you can pay any programmer to fix the problem.
Many people associate "communism" not with Libertarian or anarchist communism (which is more like Karl Marx's definition of communism), but with the authoritarian socialist systems adopted by the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea. Such authoritarian systems are not at all like free software. Quite the opposite; they are most similar to nonfree software, and a lot of the behavior exhibited by nonfree software is even somewhat similar to behaviors exhibited by authoritarian regimes (in particular, spying on the users and using malicious features to control your computing).
I do hope that there isn't too significant a number of people who ignore free software because they've heard of it being described (if only jokingly) as "communist".
Last edited by
onpon4 on Fri Apr 05, 2013 17:24, edited 1 time in total.