Software is a collection of ideas and decisions that a person has turned into a machine.
When it turns out that person has repulsive, noxious and dehumanizing ideas, it is entirely reasonable to not want the machines they've made in your life, or the decisions they've made affecting your life.
It is entirely reasonable to object to their being part of communities you care about, and to object to their ideas and decisions being normalized or valorized.
Nothing about this is complicated.
Sorry, but FOSS is as anti capitalistic as anything in my daily life which I can think of, and it kind of dominates our tech infrastructure, with capitalism’s code regularly ignoring, warping, or hairsplitting license terms to avoid accepting FOSS spirit or intent.
Disagree? Name code not relying on Apache projects, Linux, Git, MySQL, or other FOSS.
The composting moment, the thinking behind #FOSS has stagnated. The same “freedom” that opened the door to collective innovation also let capital appropriate the commons. Corporations learned to exploit open code while ignoring its intent, twisting licenses, and capturing communities. This is the #GeekProblem: confusing technical brilliance with moral neutrality, mistaking openness of code for openness of culture.
The solution is not to abandon #FOSS, but to rebalance it. We need to compost the sterile individualism that crept in, nourish the soil with social values - trust, care, shared governance, and humility. The #OMN and #OGB projects try to do this by adding a democratic layer of governance to our infrastructure, bringing social accountability to technical openness.
If we keep it #KISS - simple, human, transparent - we can rebuild code as commons again. Not as ideology solidified into control, but as cooperation solidified into action.
Because yes, software is ideology made machine, but that means it can be reprogrammed.
@cascheranno I agree, #FOSS at its best proves capitalism’s myth false: people don't need greed to create; they need curiosity, care, and community. The #openweb runs truth - code written for necessity and shared purpose, not profit.
We need to push, even with the counter-proof in plain sight, the #geekproblem creeps in - the lack of social thinking in tech. We built open code, but it's often closed in culture. Capital slid back, exploiting that lack of #4opens social clarity in current paths.
#FOSS is still one of the best evidence that cooperation beats competition. But if we don’t compost the blindness in the foundations - the idea that “neutral” tech can stay outside politics - we keep rebuilding the same power structures we thought we’d escaped.
The next step is not only defend FOSS from capitalism, but more to finish the argument: code freedom + social responsibility. That’s what projects like #OMN and #OGB are for.
Under the current system, financial incentives enable more under-privileged to contribute and prevents maintainer burnout. FOSS hasn’t succeeded at solving these problems. I also don’t see the ethics in developing software for capitalist use for free. We need a new movement for software freedom that pushes Copyfarleft licenses instead of merely Copyleft licenses.
mhoye
hamish campbell
D2
J Lou