A Commons of Software Productive Infrastructure, By and For Capital
A Commons of Software Productive Infrastructure, By and For Capital
Table of Contents
The problem
A commons of software productive infrastructure by and for capital
What is software productive infrastructure?
The GNU Project, a commons of software productive infrastructure
Attempting to open source consumer goods
The ideology of free software has failed to substantially deliver freedom in consumer software
Is FLOSS materially progressive?
Closing
The problem
There is a growing call for sustainable open source, non-profits,<br>and adjacent organisations that appears to align with the very strong<br>culture of radical anti-capitalist organising and contribution in<br>either free or open source software projects1. There is also an<br>almost unaminous shallow understanding that there is an "exploitation<br>of the software commons" by capitalists, in that software licenses<br>typically permit capitalist firms to use software without<br>reciprocating value. But it ignores that capitalist firms have always<br>been drivers of free or open source, even within the GNU Project<br>itself.
This is a narrative that itself is now part of the perpetuation of<br>exploitation, and provides an ideological exception for<br>anti-capitalists to contribute in their free time to a system that is<br>not neutral. And is in fact part of and a reinforcement of<br>capitalism2, and this is preventing us as software engineers from<br>fulfilling the social needs of end users.
A commons of software productive infrastructure by and for capital
What is software productive infrastructure?
The prevailing understanding of the economics of open source is very<br>innocent. We think romantic imagery of free-software pioneers among<br>like-minded peers in an academic environment. Or of present-day noble<br>maintainers attempting to meet the social needs of end users. But<br>this is romanticism and it is not accurate even in the context of<br>free software and the early days of the GNU project.
The problem is that the majority of work in producing software is not<br>allocated to meet the social needs of end users. Even if it were, a<br>significant proportion of work would need to be directed towards the<br>production of a software means of production, a capital good. No<br>one can make software without compilers, libraries, and other similar<br>projects that help us create software. Even the most simple software<br>will create utilities that can expand to libraries or frameworks as<br>the software develops.
Before the GNU manifesto was even published3, Stallman had to<br>build this kind of software4, starting with GNU Emacs before<br>moving onto the GNU toolchain. This is also the exact source of<br>interest in free software (and presently open source software) from<br>capitalist firms, because it reduces the costs for any capitalist firm<br>that develops software5, and any firm that uses it.
The organizations that use software, namely schools, factories,<br>offices, and e-commerce enterprises, collectively employ far more<br>software developers within their organizations than the few companies<br>who sell proprietary software, such as Microsoft. Thus, free software<br>is very attractive to these organizations as it allows them to reduce<br>their individual development costs by collectively maintaining a<br>common stock of software assets. Thus, the use-value of free software<br>is valued by organizations that can and do pay software developers<br>to make it, even though they have no exclusive copyright on it
– Free software: copyright eats itself: The Telekommunist Manifesto
This isn't restricted to just software means of production and<br>capital goods though. There is lots of other software that assist or<br>organise production even if they aren't directly a part of it. Version<br>control systems and present day git forges, communications systems<br>for coordinaing development, platform infrastructure to support<br>deployment and distribution, all have a range of open source<br>ecosystems for much the same reason as above (think Matrix, Gitlab,<br>Kubernetes etc today). Essentially we can refer to these kinds of<br>software and infrastructure as software productive<br>infrastructure. Primarily this isn't an end user consumer good, but<br>is part of the production of other products or the operation,<br>coordination, and circulation of other goods and services. Although<br>they all tend to be employed like capital goods in reducing the cost<br>of production for capitalist firms.
The GNU Project, a commons of software productive infrastructure
The GNU project explicitly has a moral grounding in the philosophy of<br>free software and tried to produce a UNIX replacement for<br>end-users. Not only for employment as a capital good for firms but<br>also as a consumer good6. And they also aimed to "finish" or<br>"complete" the GNU system (with waterfall development being the most<br>common way to produce software at the time)7. The reason why the<br>GNU project never finished is not because it was too complicated, too<br>unfocussed, but...