Would anyone be interested in collaborating on open source projects aimed towards undermining corporate control...

Yeah I wasn't sure if I interpreted that right, which is why I phrased it as a question.

Do you think he meant "focus on developing stuff for a single particular OS to begin with", or what? I was going to suggest building a web application, since that would work on any platform.

That board seems pretty dead. I doubt this thread would have as much replies as it does right now if I had posted it there. Besides, we don't necessarily have to be centered around software. Collaborating on a zine for example is cool too.

Isn't that the point of all open source?

Anyway,

I vaguely recall threads from before /gnussr/ was made that talked about starting some group or other for libre or foss or whatever stuff, but I'm afraid I can't find them. Maybe googling hollaforums.com might yield something. Or maybe asking in /gnussr/ would be simpler.

Would anyone be interested in making something like this?

this seems stupid. why?

t. person who has never been in a meeting with more than three people.

is this for a Special Ed class or a meeting?

Hey you wrote a whole proposal, nice.

I really like the idea of the community pot feature, and the algorithm you chose seems like a very equitable way of distributing resources.

Tbh I have never really participated in a group decision making process, but I imagine it can be very challenging. Have you heard of Loomio? It's open source software developed by a co-op for group decision making. It has aspects of what you're talking about but of course isn't the same. It's more like something that you would host on a server, and people can log in to make decisions. You may be interested in reading about it though, maybe some of the ideas are relevant: loomio.coop/

It's also pretty cool how your app would require certain interactions to take place outside of the app itself, it's kinda low-tech in that way. Needing only one communal smartphone is a pretty novel idea, I can see a few benefits to that as well.

There is the drawback that the larger the group becomes, the more cumbersome the voting process will be. What advantages do you see with using your app over say, everyone using a paper ballot?

What is the advantage of displaying a running vote tally? You say in the proposal that it would give an advantage to people towards the end of the chain/circle, allowing them to vote more strategically. Do you see that as a good thing, or is there some other advantage? Wouldn't it be more fair if people couldn't see until after all votes were cast?

I dunno dude I think it could be pretty cool. What are your criticisms? That user clearly put some effort into writing all that, I think you should at least offer an explanation if you're going to call it stupid.

When you are part of a party, church group, union, or other org and you have to run meetings with 20 to 30 people, you have to organize that in a way that people take turns speaking. This is not some speculation on my part. Some groups pass an item around while they do this, with the person holding the item speaking. Again, this is not how I imagine it in my head, this is how it is.

Yes, but I haven't used it or analyzed it.
Displaying a running vote tally is usually seen as a negative, as keeping everything secret until all votes are cast makes early and late voters equal. Doing it twice with voter order reversal addresses this inequality, but this still begs the question why not just keep the voting pattern a secret until the voters are all done. The answer is that this interactivity makes up for two things: 1. People can have more complicated preferences than just mentally putting the issues in two categories approval and disapproval, they can have a whole ranking of the competing proposals in their heads. And in that case, writing down these rankings would probably take longer than approving some options and doing that twice. Writing a ranked ballot on a smartphone is kinda clumsy and probably works faster with pencil and paper, but then counting paper-ballot rankings is very annoying. If people just follow the simple strategy of approving whatever they like more than what's the leading proposal in the running count when they get the phone, the final result is like that of a complicated Condorcet method with ranked ballots. 2. A few people can be in the opposite situation, being rather undecided about the proposals (and they would be very stressed out if they had to make a full strict ranking), but then when they see the running tally and two or three proposals are far ahead of the rest, they just make the much more simple decision between these.

No, I really meant that. More as a general wish though, apps designed for singular purpose of safe communication could be designed on Android, though.

Seems sensible to me. You clearly have more experience in this area so I'll have to defer to you here.

Do you code yourself?

Btw here is a quick mockup of that keksverteiler algorithm that you mentioned in the proposal. I'm pretty sure it works the way you described.

pastebin.com/ekLE5UDJ
pastebin.com/jR9zKt6G

The second version shuffles the list of desired shares before distributing resources, so the order you are sitting in is not a factor.

You can save them as an html file and open them in your browser to run them (then open the developer/"inspect element" panel and click the js console tab to see the results). I could make a simple UI for them as well if anyone is interested.

Linux is the most successful anarchist project in recent history. That being said, it has unfortunately been largely subsumed into capitalist culture via its ubiquity in Silicon Valley. I fully support and use free software to the best of my ability and urge others to do the same, but its naive to expect meaningful political change to arise from software projects, regardless of how well-coordinated they are.

Projects that circumvent surveillance should still prove to be quite useful.

I wonder how hard it is to keep up with coding something like a vpn.

I'm learning to code just to contribute to React OS and maybe other projects

Sure, I agree with you. The point I'd make with regard to something like surveillance is that while VPNs are important right now, especially for activists who are potentially being watched, the ultimate goal with regards to internet should be things like nationalizing ISPs, increasing worldwide internet penetration and securing the physical infrastructure for worker control. No open source project in and of itself can achieve these things.

I agree with you, no technology on it's own will provide a path towards anarchy. Technology has even done a lot to fuck us over, not inherently, but the way it ends up being subsumed and used against us by capitalism. Automation for example. The social and political work that needs to be done is more important than building some app, by all means.

Wikis, torrents, open encryption standards, linux, the entire free software ecosystem; these things all have an element of anarchy and/or communism to them. They would probably still exist in an anarchist society, and I don't see the harm in building them now. I would even argue that they have made some meaningful impact in people's lives. In the meantime, maybe at least they will hurt some industry's profits, and provide us with tools to learn, organize, and collaborate freely and securely.

It's important, I think, to strategically focus on things that can be beneficial to us now, rather than in some utopian ideal society.

There are also projects aimed towards restructuring the internet so that by it's very design it cannot be controlled by a state or corporate entity. Decentralized wireless mesh networks such as Freifunk. Putting the current internets infrastructure under worker control would be better and a more efficient means of communication (probably), but if we can build these sorts of networks now, why shouldnt we? The internet as it exists today is awful, telecom companys are some of the worst monopolies. The way I see it, we need to hurt them in any way we can.

Oh, I forgot to add that it's also possible that projects that are anarchist/communist in nature may make people more amenable to those ideas. That was certainly a factor for me with free software, as a young person interested in programming.

I think of it as an extension of mutual aid. Orgs like Food Not Bombs probably can have a similar effect on the people that they help.

daily reminder we should be wary of anarcocrapitalists who are trying to kill GNU and Stallman's legacy.

No it isn't. t. casual linux user

Just realized this has a pretty major bug where if the amount of resources you have exceeds the amount requested by people, the code gets stuck in an endless loop. That's not good!

Here's an updated version of the code, plus a (very) simple UI.

pastebin.com/m814yDqW

Also attached is a screenshot of how it looks.

what are they doing?

writing jit compiler for guile scheme and other projects using gccjit NOT LLVM.

Nice.

What

Isn't gccjit the Stallman approved and LLVM Apple entryism?

Open source is capitalism. Linus is a capitalist. Github would be outlawed in commieland. Linux would not exist in commieland because decentralization and working from home is forbidden. Do not be a walking contradiction.

Linus literally created git so he wouldnt have to talk to people in person:
youtu.be/o8NPllzkFhE?t=435

Communism traps you in the office and centralzation. Linus was able to make a billion dollars from free decentralized software. Be like linus.

Have you heard about tails ? I don't know if it's better than vpn but it's free.
tails.boum.org/index.en.html

Read a book.

Open Source (and humanity, ultimately) would be banned in ancapistan de facto since all the children were placed into sex slavery under their corporate overlords.

What you should do is create an app that facilitates a courier co-operative like deliveroo or uber eats but the profits go directly to the riders. I cant code but I'll be your Guinea pig worker

Not a bad idea tbh. I know fuck all about programming, so I can't be of any help either.

I had a look at the html/javascript stuff posted by and I have to say: I wish I could read code. Still, I think I could figure out some things. The html source references two outside sources, meaning that I can't just copy this one html file and bring that up in browser on a device that isn't connected to the internet. The reason it appears to work on my computer when offline is that these parts are still in my browser's memory. One part is CSS, and CSS is for style without any functional component, so deleting it just turns the thing into something that looks like a website from the mid-90s, it still works like before. Deleting the second reference breaks the thing, but I can just go to that jquery.org link, paste the incomprehensible code blob from there into the source, and it works. Both the linked CSS and jquery stuff are under a license that permits using it, as long as the copyright notice is left in the code comments.

My crappy computer freezes when this program gets really big numbers, so that version shouldn't be used to distribute Zimbabwe dollars I guess. I think three things could be done to deal with gigantic numbers: First check whether the sum of all individual requests is no higher than the total amount of stuff available, and in that case, we don't need any further computation and can just give everybody what they wish for. Second thing: Anybody wishing for no more than the proportional quota of total number of units available / number of people (result rounded down) is guaranteed to get that much, so these people can just receive their wish and be put aside. Third thing: I don't know what works better, I guess you could do either A) give each of those not put aside yet the proportional quota amount, and after that do that incremental go-around thing among them with the remaining units. B) Do the second thing recursively: We update the quota, we shrink the quota's divisor by the amount of people put aside. And what these people together demanded below their quota, we add to the amount in the nominator of the new quota. When we can't put people aside anymore, we give the remaining people equal shares of what is left (that share rounded down, and what remains because of that rounding down is put in a lottery with each remaining person having a chance to win one unit at most).

A while ago I read about free Uber clone in the works, but I can't recall the name.

I've had my eye on improving a particular GNU desktop environment component for a while. Gotta learn C++ though.

...

FOSS is literally communism. No classes or castes, no intellectual property, everyone can contribute, etc. and especially people work to make something for everyone, and instead of enforcing artificial scarcity, they let everyone redistribute it freely.

the dirty little secret is that most FOSS code is written on the job by corporate employees.

it's worth it to a lot of corporations to be thought leaders in a particular technology, so they (semi) willingly subsidize the OSS world. just look at how much code Google, Facebook, etc have open-sourced.

True, though most corporate FOSS is permissive-licensed. Also, if you read Stallman, one of his primary concerns is trying to convince programmers that they'll still be able to run a profitable business even if they make their programs free software. FOSS has massive implications for modern communism, but it's still highly shaped by capitalism.

we are people too you know, and not all of us agree with our proprietor's policies. still beats not having a job.

Addendum: and yeah, I do realize many corporate programmers are cucked beyond belief, I meet these everyday. Honestly no idea if they can be actually reached or not.

Now that I think of it, it could be just a case of Free Software (represented by guys like Richard Stallman) and Open Source (represented by Eric Raymond and his army of ancaps), with notgiveafuckists who just want to write code (led by Torvalds) and corporate employees all over the spectrum.

Anybody here familiar with constraint solvers like optaplanner?

If anything, Linux is authoritarian. There is no anarchy and very little democracy. If your contributions are shit, not only will they not be included, Linus will pick you apart in a very public manner.

This, most FLOSS projects are extremely hierarchical and authoritarian, for better or worse. Sometimes it's really obnoxious, like the GNOME devs who literally never listen to user feedback, but usually people can just fork or deal with it.

bump

Yep, pretty much any successful project has a benevolent dictator for life: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life
A strong leader is the best system since the project has a coherent vision and if the dictator were to turn incompetent people can just fork off. Whereas with a popularity contest placing blame is hard and manipulative people tend to rise.
That's only for people Linus trusts. If a random guy sends a bad patch Linus won't insult him. But if someone who has no right to be retarded (like a lead, not the guy who is just starting out) insists in being retarded Linus will tactfully explain where they should put their code.

this is retarded. It's trivial to create cross-platform applications these days. It's not fucking 1990

I would be interested in helping if there is a clear direction and script kiddies aren't on the main project until they get their shit together.

notabug.org/bkeys/DMUX
This is a video game I have been working on for about 2 years; if anyone plans on actually joining something. I got online play and combat too

Oh yeah, and customize cars too

This is a good idea. Normally decentralized systems have the problem of trust, but since it's an exchange of physical goods it's just a (mostly solved) meatspace problem. There is still the risk of competitors like Uber and Deliveroo poisoning the network with false information (eg. pretending to take an order), but I'm sure there are ways to solve that…

Actually, it could be designed as a semi-decentralized system where there is no single point of failure but each physical shop runs a program which acts as a trusted node in the network. If a new driver wants to join the network they go to any shop, pay a deposit (to discourage running off with customers' orders), and get their public key signed by the shop's node.

All of the record-keeping could use a blockchain like structure. When a driver takes an order they sign the "contract" with their private key. Any shop can blacklist a driver, but only if that driver has accepted an order from that shop recently. A blacklisted driver can easily generate a new identity and key pair, but they have to pay the deposit again.

It would probably need a lot more features that I haven't thought of and there are probably flaws in my design, but the problem is definitely solvable.

esr is a faggot and done more damage to free software than Bill Gates

That's ridiculous. Linux and other FOSS software is the purest and most effective vision of anarchy and democracy. Each individual expresses their desires and preferences based upon whether they decide to use the software, decide to contribute and use others contributions, and even whether they want to go in a completely different direction by forking it, all of this without an outside power imposing its will on them. It's nonsense to say because there's not a formal vote that means it's not democratic or that because everyone's work isn't equally liked and accepted that means it's not anarchistic.

The very fact you can fork invalidates any possibility of it being authoritarian, as such any apparent hierarchy is one voluntarily accepted, making it inconsequential.