The capitalist apparatus or "Big Society", has powerful means to put down those who dare to defy the power. By discrimination, economic isolation, legal pursuit or spoiling the reputation, when a direct blow or a disappearance is not suitable.
Ideas or tools aiming for a better world, that is freed of exploitation and without economic disequality, are rare and even more scarce if we only consider the ones that comes with a praxis and are non-reformist. Amongst them is the Free Software.
The Free Software Philosophy represent in practice, and not only as a critic, a thorn on the capitalism side. Literally: a sabot in the machine. That is, free software attacks the very concept of private property. I'll say that's political.
Free Software defines, with the aid of a copyleft license, the three qualities for the software being free.
- has to be available, the code (not in binary form, but as source, for it can be read)
- has to be modifiable (so it can be rewritten)
- the modified version has to be shareable and remains free (so it cannot be privatized)
In other words: Everybody can write software that can be used freely, being sure that his work will not be subsumed but it will remains available in time to others.
It is historically important to know and remember that the quality n. 3 clashes directly with private property, royalties, stocks, patrimonial yields, interests and others unearned incomes. Free software can still be sold and bought, but cannot become surplus-value. It cannot be accumulated. Free software is an anti-capitalist tool.
The birth of Free Software (1984) announce that the software is political and raise the issue on copyright and patent laws.
It is equally important to know and remember that the Open Source philosophy that follows (1991) gaining immediate and durable popularity, only refers to the quality n. 1 of the Free software. And Open source in fact mimics, covers, subsume and distract away from the free software goal, not being political but only developmental, not having the quality to be effective on confronting proprietary software and let alone on confronting capitalism.
The free software encompass the idea of open source and not viceversa. Free software means that is actually possible to have software (the soft machine that runs the world and the internet) that is not private property.
At the beginning, the software free was scarce. Today we have entire operative systems, desktop and mobile devices that runs entirely on free software. Since the last year due to the social distancing, communication mediate by technology has grown on frequency and importance. The pandemic raise questions about vaccine patents and availability of public health care. Soon we will have cities regulated by software. What we call society is a technological ecosystem that determine people's life as user or citizens.
It should not comes as a surprise that the inventor and leading force of the Free software, Richard M. Stallman, is under attack. And it would be a risible try to separate the attack on the person from the idea. RMS is a computer software programmer, the creator and the face of the Free Software Philosophy and it is worth to remember that Mr. Stallman life style and dedication are with intransigence and radically on the matter of freedom and free speech.
Free Software undermine capitalism who fires back. I cannot see any naivete on it.
Suggested reading: Free software, Free Society. Selected essays of Richard M. Stallman. Introduction by Lawrence Lessig. GNU Press, 2002
Update, march 31th 2021: Dear friend of mine Mr. Josh wrote to me:
Basically, I don't think free software is anti-capitalist. It is anti-monopoly, or anti-rentier, but is functionally equivalent to utilities like water and power. They are better when they are owned and governed collectively and with the goal of providing service, not profit, but during peak keynesianism plenty of capitalist firms co-existed with publicly owned utilities. And you wrote "capitalism". And almost everyone on the left makes the same critique and it's wrong.
We then agree that we don't know if a good things can be achieved with a bad method.