AnimalsDream

Here’s a more appropriate take.

I dunno, seems like a stretch to me. This particular drama probably says more about our touch-averse culture, or starvation for constant political drama.

Replace the word “communists” with “capitalists”, and the joke works every bit as well.

My own views are a bit idiosyncratic, but I don’t think capitalism has ever existed as a real thing in practice. The framework of ideas of what it’s ostensibly supposed to be has never matched any real existing system, and I see communism in the same way (albeit at least in the case of communism they explicitly state that a system must be socialist first before evolving to their ideal endpoint).

But whatever you want to call the prevailing system that does exist, it needs to go, and it should be perfectly clear that the framework of capitalism as a template is long overdue to be scrapped. How many times does an idea have to fail before everyone recognizes it’s time to move on?

I hope I’m wrong but I fully believe a crackdown on cannabis is coming.

Reality does not have a right-wing bias. Reality does not have a left-wing bias. But when the right has festered into such an anti-scientific culture as to be at war with truth and reality itself to the point at putting us all at an accelerated risk of a new dark age - then reality is maybe just a little more biased in favor of literally everyone else.

Okay, so just so we’re clear, you are not a good faith actor, then? I’ll go ahead and directly break down why you’re full of shit in that case.

Software development can be a place with employees, it’s not limited to freelance. So I don’t really get your point.

In your previous comment you said, “Can I come to your home and take your PC?”, which implies a single person, doing their own thing - a freelancer. Now you’re moving the goalpost. But okay, whatever. We’re talking about a case where you’re a part of a group of people, providing a product or service together? Then what gives you the right to be a dictator? All members of the group should have an equal stake and ownership of the properties being utilized for whatever is being made, and management of the group should be run in a way that is democratized.

But even in your new scenario, how is the outlandish idea of someone coming to your house to take your pc even in the realm of realistic possibility? If we’re talking about a group of people making software, then realistically all members probably have their own computers, and are using those to make their contributions. In this case the thing at stake is the software product. There’s already precedent for situations like this - it is possible to make an entire software compilation available to the public under one common license, and at the same time make it the case that all code and content contributions are under ownership of each individual making their contributions. Of course this is a case of permissive or copyleft license systems being applied on top of the wider framework of private intellectual property law. I’ll address that more in your next points.

But let’s go even more unrealistic. Let’s say for some weird reason that you are the only one who could afford a PC to work with, in a landscape where private property has been abolished. If we’re talking about a case where you’re a freelancer, no one else has a stake in your PC. Even if you’re using it as a “means of production”, it’s arguable the hardware should still be considered “personal property,” since it blurs a line between something you’re using for work-related activities as well as personal activities, in addition to the fact that no other workers have any kind of stake in it.

But then on the case of groups, then things start to change. As previously mentioned, no, you shouldn’t get exclusive rights to software you didn’t create yourself, as a start. As for the hardware - we already live in a landscape where there are regulatory hurdles you have to jump through in order to start a business. In a system with no private property, you would likely be expected to enter your PC and any other relevant hardware into some kind of property trust before you could even legally start to hire (or otherwise cooperate/collaborate with) other people. In that case, you have already voluntarily made the agreement that what was your PC is no longer just yours anymore. In such a case you would still have a partial ownership of your PC, but every other member of your team - likely under the umbrella of the organization that you would have had to have founded - would also have equal ownership.

And in this highly highly specific case, in which you were either too poor or too negligent as a founder to bother getting a real office to run your organization out of; if people are coming into your house and taking “your” PC, it implies that it’s YOU who has criminally done something to break the social contract that YOU agreed to. In which case, every other stakeholder would be well within their rights to get the disputes settled in the courts of law that would exist in this hypothetical scenario.

Government, and thus, laws, aren’t supposed to be the moral guide. This is not a church.

So people should be allowed to steal, assault others, and kill? Please try to make less sense.

As much as I dislike proprietary software, it’s their right to do so.

It sounds like you’re operating with a complete misunderstanding of what free software is, and why it exists. FOSS is not just another kind of product. It’s not a brand, and it’s not a commodity. It is a fundamental rewiring of the social and legal relationships between people, within the digital landscape. The foundational premise of free software is that when someone provides software to you that does not respect your rights to use, study, copy, modify, and share that software, then what they are doing is establishing an unequal - and thus unjust - power relationship over you. You can see this in practice when an app uses drm to lock you out of features, as well as when companies embed surveillance into virtually all the software we use these days - inevitably becoming direct supporters of oppressive regimes.

So yes, proprietary software is inherently unjust, and it should be supplanted, and abolished.

Moreover, free software and free culture, in my view, is the premier blueprint alternative to private property in tangible form. You should read Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, because it shows the history of the public domain - our original informational and cultural commons - how Disney built their empire on the foundation of that public domain, and then turned around to use lobbying to effectively kill it.

When you look at the full picture of how a commons often reciprocally allows wealth and abundance for many, and how ventures of private property inevitably drain, restrict, and ultimately kills that wealth and abundance for everyone except those few parasites, it starts to become clear that private property is, in fact, theft.

And it’s completely on users that we tolerate that, instead of voting with our money by donating to FOSS. But then again, if you compare how much money you can get from selling proprietary software and from donations on FOSS, it’s clear that FOSS isn’t doing great, cause they haven’t find a way to attract the same volume of money.

Your argument here is based on the loaded assumption of private property as something that’s default and justified, which I already pointed out is wrong. But to address your point about the profitabilty of FOSS, that’s just plain wrong. Sure, many choose to simply give free software away, and try relying on donations. That model only really works when a piece of software becomes widely depended on, critically so, and their struggles for funding gets enough public attention - like the case of GPG.

But that doesn’t mean that’s the only model. Everyone struggles for basic survival in our capitalistic hellscape, but that said, in the case of games for instance, ID used to have a decent model - separate engine and content, open-source the engine after some years. Continue selling the game anyway. Dwarf Fortress did something similar - they started life donation-based, then later built some quality of life improvements and sold the game on Steam - and made tens of millions.

Or the classic example, Red Hat. Their products are completely open-source. They sell it anyway. Some people opt for the free versions, and plenty of people still pay for the official ones - because the continuing support is worth it.

You’re also conflating monetary hoarding, with success of actual use. Sure, Microsoft is one of the richest companies in the world, but Linux is so ubiquitous on servers that it’s fair to say Linux runs the fucking internet. Windows might still dominate the desktop space (a position that is eroding now more than ever btw), and yet Linux’s ubiquity even goes so far as to power Android, which prevented Windows from ever dominating the mobile space (granted Android has problems of it’s own).

This needs to be situated in context too. The existing legal landscape loves private property. Its loves oligarchy. It wants to give every advantage to billionaires. And despite all of that, free software and free culture are probably two of the most successful and enduring lowkey anticapitalist movements in human history. They take private property law, and turn it against itself, creating a whole new commons that can’t be taken away. It is the Brazilian jiu-jitsu of anticapitalism. And it is the story of the Tortoise vs the Hare.

If you support FOSS, then you are already against private property - you just don’t realize it yet.

I don’t know enough about communism to say whether I support it or not, so just being clear that I’m a largely impartial observer here-

I have to ask, if you are actually trying to make your argument in good faith, are you really unable to think of reasonable answers to your own question? Like right off the top of my own head, even in our present society we have different sets of regulations for freelancers than we do for places with employees. A democratized workplace is irrelevant for a business with one worker.

That said, as a free software advocate, the topic of intellectual “property” must be addressed. Since I do think proprietary software is a moral wrong, I would support a world in which open-source is codified into law.

But the problem here is that it sounds like you’re trying to make the, “they’re coming for your toothbrush!” fearmongering in a way that almost sounds plausible, but it really isn’t if you just apply a little common sense.

No one is coming for your toothbrush, and no one is coming for your little gaming pc.

The last thing I want to hear is how great capitalism is - as told by someone that capitalism refers to as capital.

I hate cars and trucks so much.

The thing I don’t get about these self-host apps is why so many of them exist when the thing they do would be better to implement as a run of the mill offline program.

I just want to auto-import recipes from websites into a cookbook app without any fuss. We do not need to bring a server into this equation!

“Since then, Elon Musk has had no part in PayPal’s ownership. However, he does still hold a sizeable amount of stock in the company. He has sold off a large portion of it over the years, but as of 2021 he still owns over $10 billion of PayPal stock.”

https://www.ceoinfluencers.com/is-paypal-still-owned-by-elon-musk/

That doesn’t surprize me in the least. I try to commute on bike wherever feasible, but these days I almost entirely stay off roads. Biking has taught me that 99% of people do not deserve their license.

I love bicycling, and used to commute on bike almost exclusively. But I don’t do it so much anymore because I’ve had too many close calls.

I think that everyone who is in a position to stop driving should do so, and everyone else should reduce as much as possible. There could be a no-drive Sunday (assuming that’s the day the least amount of people have to drive to work). Electric cars are still unaffordable for most of us, but everyone buying bikes in a short span of time could send a message.

Trump can’t “drill baby drill” if demand plummets.

Doesn’t Elon Musk still benefit directly from Ebay?

Regime change, or regime… enshittification?

Just as a sidenote, tempeh is actually a whole food. It’s whole beans, fermented, which has the added benefits of making the beans more digestible, and reducing bloating.

Would you care to elaborate on what you feel like when you try living on plants? What do you tend to eat? How long does it take before you start feeling like shit?

Judging by your last comment about it “not hitting the same” my initial thought is that the issue might not even be nutritional, possibly more psychological/subjective.