This thought came to me in the shower today. Open source checks most of the boxes. It is a collaborative, worker owned (develloper-owned) project, that tries to flatten hierarchy. Especially if you look at something like Debian ), which really tries to have a bottom-up structure.
Of course, there are exceptions, considering there are a lot of corporate open-source projects, that are not democratically maintained and clearly only serve the interest of the company, who created it (like chromium for example).
So I am mainly talking about community-oriented FOSS projects here.
And if you were to agree with my statement, would you say that developing FOSS software is advancing the goals of the anarchist / communist project, because it is laying the groundwork infrastructure needed for a new kind of economy and society?
Thought this could be an interesting discussion!
I think FOSS enable those kind of communities but I don’t think FOSS as a concept is any of those things. those communities could equally work with a non FOSS license (eg one that prevents commercial use or a license that allow usage only by members of a specific community). They uses existing licenses because they go momentum and have legal precedents that allows people to defend their rights.
Most FOSS licenses were specifically designed to allow profiting from the wok of others, even the GPL. Just see how many billion dollar companies (think Azure, AWS, etc) profit from projects without giving anything back.