Please, quit the cheap sophistry.
Evolution doesn't intend or plan anything for us, and you will have a very hard time convincing people that we would be better off living in a tribal/clan society than whatever we have today.
And no matter what you think about tribal societies, we still live in tribes every day. You and your close friends are a tribe. Your family is a tribe. Forums and now social media communities are tribes. HackerNews is a tribe. Open source projects are tribes, indeed they fork over ideological differences all the time. Political parties are tribes, indeed they split and antagonize each other all the time. Nationalities are tribes. Companies are tribes. Social classes are tribes. Subcultures and "identities" are tribes.
We are not built to handle global contexts, so we collapse them into tribal ones. We do that for everything. There's always an in-group and an out-group and a hierarchy if we're talking about a cluster of people.
I can agree with you about the issue of societies failing to organize themselves past a certain scale, but this is not a problem with "Capitalism".
My issue with capitalism is fundamentally split in three parts: that profit is the driving force behind action; that short term effects are prioritized over long term ones; and that global markets operate at a scale that does not allow individuals to have any real agency in their environment due to the points outlined in the previous comment.
It just fosters the kind of behavior that goes against my idealized version of what society should be according to my understanding of the conditions in which we thrive.
i.e. it turns people into selfish venal assholes and it destroys our chances at a better future with each passing day
Perhaps I'm also using a wrong definition of anarchy then. But it's honestly the closest label I know for this concept. A less centralized society.
I can pretty much guarantee hunter-gatherers hunt to not starve, children play for sheer joy, and nobody's thinking of profit.
There are better psychological/anthropological terms to apply to human drives than calling them "profitable". That's weird economist thinking, trying to bring everything under their purview.
At least that’s what is going on when the schools of “thought” this kind of stuff comes from attempt it. This particular poster might not be. But usually it’s a cheap rhetorical trick, coming from folks who present themselves as simply following logic. Gross.
Again, please quit the cheap sophistry.
> the kind of behavior that goes against my idealized version of what society should be
Are you listening to yourself? You sound like a college sophomore who is sure has a solution to all of humanity's problems...
> turns people into selfish venal assholes
... and can only assign blame on others.
I can bet you nourish some well-developed fantasies about what you would do if you were given enough power over any "less centralized society", and they are a lot more about imposing your view over everyone than ensuring your small community can prosper and be happy.
Why are they required to be exclusive? If I said that uncontrolled train crossings lead to more train crashes, would you retort that train crashes aren't exclusive to uncontrolled crossings?
They are not required to be exclusive, but it would require that we can establish cause and effect.
If you tell me that your "issue with Capitalism" is that "we have people driven by profit/greed and wealth is unevenly distributed", but a quick look through history tells you we can always find "people driven by personal gain and wealth inequality", then what does "Capitalism" has to do with it?
Indeed I gave you three constraints but you're only looking at one independently.
When else in history were markets global? Why am I arguing with someone who can't even read?
Right, so the fundamental issue is that we are living in a globalized world, which reduces any room for nuance and imposes an uniform and homogenized culture, top-down policy-making, and a totalitarian approach by the ruling class.
Thing is, this would still be our reality regardless of the economic system. Globalism would be a problem even if the Soviet Union had won the cold war.
We would still be subjected to uniform culture, top-down policy-making and totalitarianism.
The people would still be acting by their own personal interests.
People would still favor short term benefits over long term prosperity.
So, again: what does Capitalism has to do with it?
Damn, you sound very angry for someone who is having a calm discussion on the internet. More importantly, you seem to be assuming a lot of stuff about me but we've never met. And you have no clue about how much of it is right.
So please just, kindly, shut up. You look like an ass.
And I'd argue that doing something for profit is also against the spirit of open source, but that's a different argument. The thing is that open source is for the most part an effort from hackers, hobbyists and professionals who want to foster a positive ecosystem for people like themselves. To make their passion better and simpler and more fun and more accessible and more interesting and safer and more efficient and more general... So that more people might fall in love with it.
It's not to push a product or to convince people that they need it. And that sentiment comes from the fact that open source is the reason many people got into programming in the first place! Thanks to all the free resources out there. So they want to give back to the community. That's how I feel about it at least.
But then again, when huge corpos contribute to open source it's great because they have a lot of inertia. So I think that's a good thing, it's a positive feedback loop. My previous point is not black and white, even though I am obviously bitter about a lot of things.
The idea really isn't so far fetched, lots of projects today have non-legal outlines of expectations of community members. For a single example, codes of conduct are very common.
Again, this thread is about whether we as a society, or as the software development community at large, consider the behavior ethical or not. It is not about the specific open source developer imposing specific rules.
FOSS licenses don't, and can't, embody anarchism (or any socialism) because they make no distinction between humans and capital-holding entities, lumping them all under the term "users".
FOSS is fundamentally anarchy (the good kind that shows that human beings are not all pieces of shit). Anarchy can't exist in a capitalist society because it shows people that they don't HAVE to live like slaves. They can live as members of tribes, as evolution intended for us.
So as always the organism is originally healthy and successful until the parasite that is capitalism spreads and suffocates it for its own reproduction.