Free and open-source software

A tongue-in-cheek photoshopped poster equating open source development to communism, based on an actual poster from the Recording Industry Association of America claiming that pirating MP3s is "downloading communism"

Free and open-source software (FOSS) or Libre Software is software that is free (as in freedom) to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve. For a piece of software to be considered Free and Open Source, it must comply to a small set of requirements laid down by the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

Relevance and Usage by Socialist Countries

FOSS (most times present in it's bastardized fashion, "Open-Source") is relevant to the world in multiple ways. There are many notable projects that are Free Software, including MediaWiki (the software ProleWiki is built on), GNU/Linux and OpenSSL.

Socialist countries such as China, Cuba and Korea (DPRK) have invested heavily on FOSS for both daily and government usage, mainly in the Operating System space, socialist FOSS projects of note include:

• Red Star OS, a GNU/Linux Operating System that is privately used by Korean government officials. It is based on FOSS software and is proprietary due to it's nature as a tool for mostly government use.
• Nova, a GNU/Linux Operating System made by university students in Cuba focusing on security. Meant for both government and general use, and available to the public for free.
• PaddlePaddle, a machine learning algorithm developed by Baidu in collaboration with the Chinese government, mainly for use in search engines.
• COVID19-Cuba, an Android application used to aggregate data about the COVID-19 pandemic and help citizens stay away from regions with a high infection rate.

Essential Freedoms

To be considered FOSS, a program must offer all of these freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

History and Loss of Prominence

The Free Software movement was created by Richard Matthew Stallman, a liberal who believed that only for software in particular, freedom of distribution and modification was more important than the freedom of capital. The FSF sought to make FOSS widespread and succeeded in doing so with the release of it's GNU Operating System.

The GNU Operating System, nowadays known as GNU/Linux or just Linux, sought to replace the proprietary and monopolized versions of the common UNIX Operating System. GNU brought massive success to the Free Software movement due to running on most mainline enterprise and university machines at the time, and providing an easy and democratized platform for development, wherein developers and users would not need to pay expensive licensing fees to have a quality OS in their machine and develop software for it.

After having massive success, the Free Software movement was hijacked by capital, with it's most well-known version being the "Open-Source" movement, which does not have user freedoms as it's main goals, instead only taking advantage of the free labour that comes with having a community willing to contribute and allowing companies to effectively steal software without making their contributions public.

The movement for Free Software began to lose it's relevancy in capitalist circles after a last-ditch effort from the Free Software Foundation to curb the major influence of capital and the de-facto proprietarization of software under the GNU General Public License (GPL) with the creation of the GPLv3. The main intention of the GPLv3 was closing loopholes exploited by companies that allowed them to ship Free Software in hardware that could not be accessed and made to run modified versions of that software (a practice commonly called "Tivoization", named after the company that pioneered it).

After the threat posed to them by the GPLv3, companies which did not want to go back to their proprietary platforms and miss on the free labour started to fund alternatives to GPL-licensed software or began making software projects themselves, and the Free Software movement ended up being quickly replaced in the mainstream by it's capital-friendly cousin, the "Open-Source" Movement. The last straw on the FSF and the Free Software Movement's back was the decision of the Linux kernel to stay with GPLv2, which contained all the loopholes that the GPLv3 sought to fix.

Nowadays, in left-wing software development, the FSF and the Free Software Movement are beginning to be abandoned after Richard M. Stallman's defence of right-wing politicians and pedophilia along with revelations of discrimination against women and LGBTQ+ people in the FSF and other "old-school" Free Software movement spaces. The socialist alternative to the GPL is nowadays thought to be the Anti-Capitalist Software License (ACSL), along with many other niche licenses that fill some functions of Free Software, while introducing usage limitations to government agencies or right-wing organizations (breaking freedom 0).