The interoperability is good, but I’d much rather Chinese firms fund the work of the Document Foundation and derive their products from that rather than create their own in-house M$ office clones.
Collectively owned software is going to be incredibly important for the rest of the Global South who don’t have ginormous IT industries who can rebuild everything from scratch.
Absolutely agree. this is one of those examples where China’s interests in nation building and “multipolarism” are at odds with internationalism (at least in the short term).
It doesn’t really help the case that open source software can be co-opted by bourgeois interests just like any other form. If we look at Linux, for example, we see cases whereby the US state has overt influence over its development. Linus Torvalds gleefully mocked the labour of countless contributors whom he barred from developing the kernel due to their Russian nationality.
The openness of open software is truly It’s greater strength but no permissive or restrictive licence will ever be able to thoroughly reject influence from the bourgeois state. Neither does private software, for that matter, though I guess that just means there’s no push or pull either way.
That is true, it’s because with collectively owned software, the power is put into the hands of the workers who create the program rather than to the “owners” of said program.
It just happens (not by coincidence) that computer programming is heavily euro-centric and the IT industry is flourished under capitalism which leads to capitalists doing this
The term “open source” itself was coined by techbros who wanted to explicitly de-politicize the free software movement and make it into a hobby space for privileged people rather than an ethical mode of production.
The main issue facing workers who create non-privatized software is funding and the Global South should look to providing that funding to collective infrastructure to actually make technological reforms rather than realizing that they don’t have the labor capacity and timeline and then doing nothing because of it.
The interoperability is good, but I’d much rather Chinese firms fund the work of the Document Foundation and derive their products from that rather than create their own in-house M$ office clones.
Collectively owned software is going to be incredibly important for the rest of the Global South who don’t have ginormous IT industries who can rebuild everything from scratch.
Absolutely agree. this is one of those examples where China’s interests in nation building and “multipolarism” are at odds with internationalism (at least in the short term).
It doesn’t really help the case that open source software can be co-opted by bourgeois interests just like any other form. If we look at Linux, for example, we see cases whereby the US state has overt influence over its development. Linus Torvalds gleefully mocked the labour of countless contributors whom he barred from developing the kernel due to their Russian nationality.
The openness of open software is truly It’s greater strength but no permissive or restrictive licence will ever be able to thoroughly reject influence from the bourgeois state. Neither does private software, for that matter, though I guess that just means there’s no push or pull either way.
That is true, it’s because with collectively owned software, the power is put into the hands of the workers who create the program rather than to the “owners” of said program.
It just happens (not by coincidence) that computer programming is heavily euro-centric and the IT industry is flourished under capitalism which leads to capitalists doing this
The term “open source” itself was coined by techbros who wanted to explicitly de-politicize the free software movement and make it into a hobby space for privileged people rather than an ethical mode of production.
The main issue facing workers who create non-privatized software is funding and the Global South should look to providing that funding to collective infrastructure to actually make technological reforms rather than realizing that they don’t have the labor capacity and timeline and then doing nothing because of it.
You’re making use the zero-sum RAND/Mearsheimer definition of multipolarity here, not the Chinese definition.