I think that a Marxist society should allow for 0 proprietary software, and instead support for everything in free and open source decentralized technology.
It goes hand-in-hand with a post-revolution socialist society. Proprietary software is essentially private property, which would be eradicated in a worker’s state. It would most likely not be a first priority for the new state as there are more pressing matters - for the US for example, the dismantling of the military and the closing down of all international bases - but it would be inevitable with socialism.
I was trying to figure out how to say what you said so I’ll just piggy back. I agree that moving from proprietary to foss is definitely one aspect of the “withering away of the state”. Engels didn’t explicitly write about software for obvious reasons but yeah lol.
I think, and this is probably preaching to the choir, but one thing that we can keep doing is just supporting foss and try to get more people to use and contribute. Regardless of if the revolution were to happen tomorrow, we’ve definitely seen a big uptick in open source being used over the last 20-30 years.
I’ve seen people bring up that Lemmy/Mast/kbin are open source and my thoughts is always “as it should be”. We are living through what I think might be a software revolution as more people get fed up with data harvesting and proprietary services. Will this era last? Who knows but I hope it does.
Funny enough, Linux and foss were what actually started my radicalization to the left. Back when I was using Ubuntu 9.10 I just kept asking why this wasn’t this the norm? I mean Linux growing pains baggage aside that is.
This reminds me: it’s time to install Linux. But I don’t know where to start. I’ll open another thread and see if anyone can help.
Depending on your level of tech knowledge, my rec is Arch or Linux Mint. Linux Mint is practically good to go OOtB. Pop!_OS is another one that has gained popularity over the last few years. NixOS I think is the new distro that is getting a lot of buzz right now but I’m gonna wait to see where it goes and how it matures before looking at it. I’ve settled on Mint and have been using it for about 5 years as my daily driver now.
Segueing off your arch recommendation, RebornOS is a really good beginner friendly Arch based repo.
