Similar motivations for sure. I mean there is a reason stallman like to call it copy left.

I would say so yes, but only if you view it as a communist enclave within capitalism.

The tricky bit is that FOSS exists in an environment that’s devoid of scarcity. If I write code and post it under a Free license, you can make infinite copies and use it without depriving me of it. That’s rather different from a scenario where I might spend my labour extracting a finite number of carrots from the earth.

Still, I think it’s an excellent demonstration that the working class is willing to spend its efforts in a sharing economy… so long as the benefits are reciprocal.

It’s an interesting question. I don’t think I’d say it’s inherently socialist, as that’s a fairly strong statement. I would say, though, that FOSS really shows humans’ ability and desire to create useful things outside of the profit motive. That we are not slaves to “rational self-interest” and without the profit motive, nothing will ever get done. I think that dovetails nicely with what we know a socialist society can be built on.

Cowbee nailed the core distinctions, but let me add that open source provides a living counter argument to the deeply ingrained dogma that capitalist hierarchies and profit incentives are the only way to organize labor and drive innovation. It’s a useful tool for talking about alternative ways to organize labor to people who’ve been indoctrinated into capitalist way of thinking.

Every day, developers around the world contribute to projects like Linux or Wikipedia without a single dollar changing hands. They collaborate, debug, and build for shared purpose, recognition, or pure intellectual curiosity. This isn’t a fringe phenomenon either, it’s a massive, global ecosystem that produces tools and systems entire industries rely on.

Open source demonstrates that people don’t need to be managed by shareholders or driven by personal profit to create complex and valuable things. Workers can self organize efficiently all on their own. Different projects and communities manage to interoperate and thrive organically within this framework.

So open source stands as a direct and tangible refutation to the argument that without capitalism nothing would get done. It’s concrete proof that cooperation can fuel advancement and that we’ve been sold a story about work and motivation that is fundamentally flawed.

Not inherently, but it does somewhat fall under the same umbrella. Cowbee summed it up far better than I could.

That being said, it’s kind of ironic how many FOSS projects are maintained by nazi chuds.

Yes, but also no. Lots of communists support FOSS, but communism is a much broader movement that cannot be localized to individual software projects. A worker cooperative is not really socialist, because it only has equal ownership for the worker-owners within said cell, and isn’t actually collectivized production and distribution. A society isn’t socialist for having FOSS, but because public ownership is the principle aspect and the working class in charge of the state. When we think of socialism and communism, we need to recognize these as interconnected systems, and not something we can just slice out of any society and judge at an individual level in a vacuum.