I expect that by "communism" the poster means "a belief system I don't agree with"[0]. (In fairness, given that there are probably dozens of mutually-incompatible Marxist/socialist/communist philosophies, combined with the poster's use of the prefix "pseudo", means that pretty much any belief can, with sufficient effort, be described as "pseudo-communist".)
[0] (My understanding (I'm Canadian) is that this use of the word is a rather quaint Americanism, and has, fortunately, mostly failed to propagate into other dialects of English.)
because it gives my rant a nice tinge of political edginess.
I view the FSF as software socialists, as in they have a utopian view of how things should be and everyone should buy in and give all of their stuff to everyone else for the good of the community. I also view socialism as an impossible ideal to achieve. In my opinion, all attempts at socialism have ended in communism, where the ruling class tells the people they have socialism but in reality the people at the top of the chain don't buy into it and live much better lives.
Finally, I used the prefix "pseudo" because obviously we're talking about software and not the rise and fall of empires (although Facebook is sort of a digital empire) so I didn't want to attach a full-on label of "communism" to it.
edit: I'm sure someone who has studied politics way more than I have will come in here and point out that I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground, and that's fine. I bitched about the FSF and I feel better so my mission was accomplished.
Yes, vote me down further! PUNISH ME FOR USING WORDS YOU DO NOT LIKE.
I'm sure someone who has studied politics way more than I have will come in here and point out that I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground, and that's fine.
Hello! :)
Socialism, Communism, et all are very broad terms. It would behoove any points you make to not use them pejoratively, because they are simply too broad to use in the way you're using them. Especially utopianism, which no more describes socialists than it describes many capitalists.
You could make an argument that the FSF follows the ideals of a very soft libertarian socialism, but that's a stretch.
The FSF is very single-issue, they don't talk about social equality, they don't even have a critique of capitalism and wages. If they're communists, they're particularly undeveloped ones.
