Property Rights in Capitalism: “Open Source” Software

There is a petty-bourgeois illusion that has taken hold in the turbulent world of software: the fantasy that one can wage a small-scale anarchist-style war against capital operating in the software industry by developing and promoting open source alternatives to solutions protected by intellectual property rights, without overcoming capitalism as a whole.

Open source programs are those whose use is publicly available, and the source code is also available, allowing modifications, additions, and improvements by anyone capable of working on them to produce functioning programs or enhancements.

The idea that this conflict exists is unfounded since the capitalism is the generalized production of commodities, whose intrinsic economic laws exert an iron grip on the whole of society, transforming almost everything produced into commodities, diverting, altering, and revolutionizing every production process, and not stopping until the entire world has become a market. Computer software is certainly no exception.

The open-source movement, which developed in the 1980s, pays no heed whatsoever to the bourgeois nature of ownership of material goods and so-called “intellectual” property. The stated goal of the activists involved was to fight on behalf of small entrepreneurs against the giants and ruthless, evil monopolies like IBM, which dominated the technological landscape of those years.

Over the years, there has been much discussion about companies that “give back to the community.” To promote the development of key open-source software, many large companies today contribute financial donations through various non-profit organizations such as the Linux Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation. This arrangement benefits the status quo, as it is more cost-effective than hiring in-house developers. Today, large companies, which have the necessary capital to do so, have hired their own internal teams of workers who contribute to open-source projects. These are projects that have become so critical due to their ubiquity and have thus become a channel through which larger enterprises can collaborate on creating the tools they collectively rely on. This is the result of the centralization of capital. Open-source software has played another fundamental role for capital invested in the sector: the definition of various standards for application programming interfaces, operating system implementations, network protocols, programming languages, Internet technologies, cryptographic algorithms, and many other systems on which our society relies today.

When capital is invested in a new field or a particularly promising new technology—as happened with personal computers, the Internet, and now with devices known as smartphones—a battleground opens up over proprietary standards and related technologies. After an intense struggle among thousands of new companies, the market ultimately selects—as we see today—a few large companies that are competitors but must at the same time cooperate to some extent as business partners. This cooperation is effectively the division of labor among different companies. At the end of the phase of open and anarchic struggle, the general technical level reaches its highest point; in the realm of these “mature” technologies, to ensure interoperability in the areas where different hardware and software systems—or parts of a given system—interact, various standards have been established by multiple companies that have come together and agreed on how to implement things on an industrial scale.

Non-profit institutions such as ANSI and ISO were created by the bourgeoisie precisely for this purpose: to find common ground, dictate rules, and organize the capitalist class in every sector. This entails a number of advantages. First, it significantly accelerates the adoption of a common standard. Second, it provides the industry with a set of common open-source tools it can rely on and build upon without every company having to start from scratch. Finally, it ensures the smooth operation of systems by facilitating interoperability testing between different systems. Thus, the workforce has at its disposal this set of openly available tools, with which it is already familiar and on which it has been trained, whether during employment with another capitalist or in its free time, thereby reducing the time and costs required for training and making the free movement of labor—its absorption into and expulsion from the labor market—more fluid, wherever and whenever circumstances require it. All these factors contribute to significantly reducing costs and increasing profits.

The petty-bourgeois dream that began over forty years ago has come true, but not in the forms envisioned by those who began working on this “project.” Companies—whether trillion-dollar corporations or small startups operating out of apartments—thrive thanks to open source and the voluntary work performed for free by developers in their spare time, or through their work sponsored and collectively funded by capital via nonprofit foundations.

Although it is true that the enormous amount of work done for free solely for personal pleasure may serve as proof that work does not necessarily have to be wage labor, this does not bring us any closer to socialism: engaging in this type of work or promoting it for ideological purposes is just another form of activism. Ultimately, all software will be “free” from the chains of capital, the production of surplus value, and private appropriation only under communism, when the goal of production will be use-value rather than exchange-value—that is, serving the needs of humanity. Even though fragmentation will no longer be a problem because production will be centralized and planned accordingly, this does not mean that individuals will not be free to pursue their own exciting projects. Only communism will abolish intellectual property, which is nothing more than an aspect of private property.