> FOSS is a great path for workers to seize the means of production.
It's... not. Open Source is not a business model, nor a collective organizing principle, bargaining process, etc. It's just source code a couple of people have commit access to. I'm all in favor of everybody sharing source code too, but let's not pretend it's magic. Building and sustaining any kind of organization takes work, and has nothing to do with whether your source code is open or closed.
>It's... not. Open Source is not a business model, nor a collective organizing principle, bargaining process, etc. It's just source code a couple of people have commit access to.
in fact that's one of the driving characteristic differences between open source and FOSS; one is accompanied with a set of guiding moral and ethical principals regarding fundamental user freedom.
FOSS absolutely does have an effect on how your movement is organized and if you depend on it it can be an accelerator.
But FOSS doesn't create some kind of socialist utopia as some people seem to believe. It does something much more mundane yet infinitely more valuable in our fractured modern world: it unites bitter enemies and gets them to collaborate.
Look at the contributors to the Linux kernel, which even includes Microsoft now. It's hard to imagine any other force which could unite all those people and businesses under a common cause. But thanks to the GPL, even as their wars with each other continue they are all contributing resources to the public good.
It's so popular these days to flame and dehumanize the other side of any debate but all that does is destroy. FOSS builds and extends humanity's common heritage. It won't win the war for you but it will redirect your energies into creation and ensure that you leave something good behind.
"Bitter enemies" work together all the time without open source. Competing companies partner on initiatives, join the same boards, help each other pass new standards. Companies do not have emotions. They have profits and losses, marketing, products, coalitions, industry associations, etc. They are fine with working with competitors if it has no downside. Often they have to work with competitors, if only because their parent conglomerates are so large that they each depend on some product or service the other provides, or their customers use some product of the customer's and supporting it keeps their customers around. It's just part of doing business.
There is no magic to FOSS. It's just a weird quirk in the global capitalist market. It has no real bearing on business, unless your business is catering to the tiny minority of people who care only about FOSS.
Thank you for writing this out, I never worded it like this to myself but it makes so much sense.
I love the FOSS movement's use of the legal system, mixed with ease of adoption, to force big players to contribute.
FOSS, while not being a socialist utopia, is one of the few truly cooperative systems in our society, and it also goes to show you cannot trust people(corporations) to contribute out of the good of their heart, you have to force their hand through the very tools(ip law) that these people and corporations use to wield their own power.
This may stray past your original point, but whenever I hear someone complain about something being "authoritarian", I find it hard to take seriously because the profit motive almost always goes against a general common good. ie covid lockdowns, lives saved vs dollars earned, where do your priorities lie?
I'd like you to imagine a world where GNU and Linux never took off, where we'd probably all be paying for Windows Server licenses in order to run websites. One where you need to pay to download a compiler, and all you get is the binary.
That's hard to imagine, given the freedoms we enjoy now. I can download a world-class OS for free and distribute changes to it without any hinderance other than my own skill barriers. Same for DVCSes, video players, browsers, modelling software, desktop environments, compilers, and so on... That was not the case in the early 90s.
FOSS wasn't a complete nor a permanent revolution, but revolutions rarely are. Point is, it changed the world, it changed business, it changed developers' day to day experience, and it's disingenuous to pretend otherwise. We still rely on corporations to make software, but they are now socially pressured and incentivized to release the source of a large portion of what they make for free. Maybe we haven't seized the means, but we are right there with the big guys at the means, sharing power in a (relatively) new and exciting way.
MINIX and BSD were already free. More free tools would crop up, just like free Windows tools abounded since their inception, like the hobbyist software that was traded for free before that. Nerds who just like making software would always have kept giving it away for free, because they just like the fact that they can and it's fun to do.
It didn't change the world that much. Nearly every company that makes internal software refuses to release it for free. They'll happily use whatever you give them for free, of course. But even if it weren't around for free, they'd just pay for something else. Most people would probably use Android as the example of the "revolution" paying off, but before Android everyone just paid to license mobile OSes, and they will again when Android eventually dies. Business does not care about the morality of a license, nor sharing code. You pay for what you need when you need to, don't pay for what you don't need to, and pass the cost on to the customer. Simple as that.
It's... not. Open Source is not a business model, nor a collective organizing principle, bargaining process, etc. It's just source code a couple of people have commit access to. I'm all in favor of everybody sharing source code too, but let's not pretend it's magic. Building and sustaining any kind of organization takes work, and has nothing to do with whether your source code is open or closed.