Is Free Software Communism?

It has often been alleged by critics that open source, or free software is a communist approach to software. Not infrequently is it that an advocate will rebuke, however, that free software is the “free market” at its finest, giving people ultimate choice over what they want in their program. But both of these declarations often underlie a fundamental misunderstanding of these ideas.

What is Open Source and Free Software?

Before one can begin to ideologically categorize open source, one must ask what open source even is. Open source, speaking in the broadest possible terms, is software which has its source code freely available for any person to access. Open source may also sometimes refer only to something which meets this description while also allowing any person the freedom to use, edit and duplicate this source code, free of any financial transaction. This more strict criteria for open source may refer to the former as “source available”.

The notion of free software, however, is often described as highly ideological. The Free Software Foundation, for example, and its everpresent sexist garbage monkey Richard Stallman base much of their work on the ideological necessity of software being “free”, which they mean to say can be used for any purpose, can have its source code analyzed and modified, and which can be redistributed by anyone. Many free software advocates, the FSF included, decry “open source” as a corporate friendly perversion of Free Software. Indeed, it is exceedingly rare to happen upon a company advertising itself as dealing in “Free Software”, yet companies dealing in “Open Source” are plentiful.

Wait, What’s the Difference?

Of course, these definitions are somewhat vague and unhelpful. Such is the nature of debating semantics, it is a purely subjective field in which any and all could argue that their definition ought be what people use. For the purposes of this discussion, we will assume however, that open source and free software refer, practically, to the same concept, that is code which can be contributed to publicly and which can be used by anyone however they need to. We will also grant that “Open Source” is indeed less ideologically driven by those who use it. I see no reason to doubt this, as the Free Software Foundation greatly emphasizes the moral factor of free software whereas a group such as the Linux Foundation, or Linus Torvalds himself seem far more concerned with the practical benefits of openness in development.

A number of questions arise from the preceding statements. For instance, what is ideology if not something in search of practical benefits? The utilitarian seeks the practical benefit of “maximizing utility”, the liberal seeks the practical benefit of a “resilient economy”, even a lowly creature such as the fascist seeks the practical benefit of “racial purity”. Is seeking the benefit of better functioning code not also something fundamentally philosophical? The notion that having code less prone to bugs being a good thing is, of course, something which can only be arrived at if we have a benchmark for something being good, which must come only from philosophy. This is, of course, only tangentially related to the topic in question, but it is most intriguing to think about.

What even is Communism Anyway?

More relevant to the subject at hand is the question, “is code made freely available for anyone to contribute to and for anyone to use communist?” We have now defined what open source and free software are. Good on us. But we are yet to define communism. The term Communism is often used to describe a regime in which every person receives even compensation, working under the employ of a state which is operated by a single, generally unelected party. But is this really what communists want? Has this ever even existed? The Soviet Union never claimed to be communist, nor does China, Cuba, North Korea, or Canada. Neither has any of these states ever provided identical monetary compensation to all people within its borders. This is not even how Karl Marx, often described as the father of communism would describe this system. In fact, most of these systems, perhaps Canada aside, would be best described as Marxist-Leninist, an ideology which espouses the creation of a phase between capitalism and communism which it calls socialism.

Yet many leftists, political scientists, social democrats, and even reactionaries would reel at this definition, arguing that socialism means any number of things, from democratic ownership of the means of production, to government intervention in the economy, to women in video games. It becomes quickly apparent that there is even less of a consensus on the definition of socialism than there is on the definition of open source. The Left tears itself apart at any question, especially one as fundamental as this one.

So, let us see what the self-described communists describe communism as. Looking at the forum r/communism101, we find no shortage of individuals saying aptly that communism is a “stateless, classless, moneyless society with democratic organization of the means of production, wherein goods are produced under the doctrine of from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”, or some derivation of that statement. Yet even here we will find not one iota of agreement on what a state is, or what classes are. But nothing will appease anyone, so we should carry on with this definition.

The Big Question

We now have defined our variables, and it is time to create our philisophical if statement. Is “software which anyone can contribute to and use freely stateless, classless, moneyless, organized democratically, and organized from the principles of from each according to their need to each according to their ability”. The answer, as should be obvious, is yes.

Of course free software is communism you dingbats! That’s its strength!

The definitions of free software and of communism are almost perfectly in alignment. The only thing which is perhaps debatable is the presence of democracy within free software projects. This has, historically, been unfortunately infrequent in its application. The majority of projects are organized with a benevolent dictator at its center. While abuses of power are historically fairly infrequent, due to the fact that anything can be forked giving everything its own kind of democracy. Even so, democracy is something clearly lacking in free software at the present. Democracy could substantially improve free software if it were better applied.

Conclusion

Free Software is a communist approach to software, employing the freedom of any person who is able to contribute to a project, and enabling any person who wants to use the software to do so. This is what has allowed it to become such a big deal. Without communism, there would be no freedom in free software. Criticism of free software as communist stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what communism is, as does deflection of these claims. Free software is communist. Many ills involving it rest upon it not being communist enough. More democracy would be able to avoid deeply unpopular changes to these open source projects altogether, such as Ubuntu’s
spying functionality (even though this functionality is fairly minimal, it is still something which we would like to do without, is it not?). It could also avoid other disasters such as CentOs’ change in development model, or Mozilla dropping support of progressive web apps in Firefox. Free Software is Communist, but it is not communist enough.

Solidarity forever,
A. H. Parker