Democracy

Are most FOSS-projects democracies? Uhh… No? Most FOSS-projects are either dictatorships or following Fossarchy-Mossarchy (the collective ideology of Fossarchy and Mossarchy). More civilized, structured and bigger projects might have another way of doing it but that’s in no way guaranteed.

VIM

VIM (Vi IMproved) is a text editor made by (RIP) Bram Moolenaar. VIM is what I’d like to call a charitocracy, which in FOSS terms means the following:

A charitocracy is a FOSS-governance method that can easily be summarized in one sentence: Democracy for the charitable. For example: VIM is charityware and people that donate to the VIM foundation (which in turn donates to a foundation to help starving children in Uganda) are the charitocrats. They can engage in direct democracy (which is also one of the principles of marxocracy).

Though, for the most part: Bram Moolenaar was a BDFL, so before he sadly passed away, it was more like a charito-dictatorship (the collective term for a charitocracy and a dictatorship that coexist). Nowadays: It’s basically a charitocracy.

Why VIM?

I bring up VIM in a response to the notion that “democracy is impossible in FOSS”, which many people (sadly) seem to be under the impression of. VIM is a very close example of a FOSS-democracy. People of the world, open source is supposed to be democratic!

FOSS-Democracy and Counter-Authoritarianism

FOSS sprung up in response to a increasingly authoritarian market, where monopolies control everything and the small projects of the world slowly wither away, never to be seen again. FOSS was able to counteract this trough helping each other and providing the common man with counter-authoritarian tools as well as counter-authoritarian software. After hearing this, doesn’t FOSS-Democracy sound like the next step? We can’t both be counter-authoritarian and authoritarian, right? Yet Fossarchy-Mossarchy is way to deregulated for a software development community to ever thrive in. Democracy is the comfortable life we live in, why not bring it to our software, too?

Modern FOSS

In modern FOSS, democracies are very rare, even among bigger projects! Godot, for example: It’s by no means a democracy. Democracy is also what I believe to be the first step toward Marxocracy in the modern FOSS-sphere. Nowadays, worse systems like meritocracy or maybe even oligarchy dominate the FOSS market. It is truly a disgusting sight.

Curbing democracy

Democracy in FOSS – just like democracy in real life – is not unbreakable. A good way to illustrate this is to define an inevitable roadmap for any FOSS project. I will call this roadmap “The FOSS-corruption cycle”:

  1. A FOSS project is formed.
  2. It gets larger.
  3. It assumes X governance system (X = democracy right now).
  4. It gets even larger.
  5. It opens up a donation option.
  6. Large corporation donates ~€10,000,000.
  7. Corporation controls everything.
  8. A possible fork is formed, the fork recurses.

What often happens in FOSS is that bigger companies go and invest in smaller – yet popular – projects (for example: Godot is closer to an oligarchy than a democracy). It’s a very sad process that ruins FOSS-projects worldwide and impacts all of the developers of the impacted project.

Breaking the cycle

How are we supposed to break the cycle? Break the cycle of corruption in open source so prevalent in the modern day? I’ll give you a second to think… 3, 2, 1… Okay, please look at step 5. “It opens up a donation option”. What we can do is… Just not. If we don’t accept money from these big corporations, we can’t get curbed out of our democracy! Do not fold! Stay strong and never give up on maintaining both your project, and democracy.

Anti-partisanship

A modern democracy tends to be a representative democracy. While this may sometimes work in real-life, it never works in FOSS. You see, a party is less an organization than a package of beliefs, which more often than not leads to tribalism (if you want to know why that’s a problem, refer to FOSS-culture). In Marxocracy and FOSS-democracy in general, it’s important to be anti-partisan, meaning not being for any party, and not wanting any parties. There’s very much a reason for me citing direct democracy as a core part of Marxocracy, and not just democracy.

Initiating conversation

If you agree with my ideas and want to spread them: A good way to do so is to propose democracy to an open-source project you contribute frequently to. It may be a big project, it may be a small one. The important thing is to initiate democracy. Every new democratic project is one step towards full Marxocracy. For further reading on FOSS-democracy – which also coincidentally brings up many of the points about anarchy I’ve covered –, see this paper, which more or less confirms democracy as the right way of governance for FOSS. Unlike what we’ll be covering next:

Next chapter: Meritocracy