Open Source Technology

We call for true open-source technology that affirms shared and collective development while rejecting the monopoly power of major technology companies. Technologies that cannot be understood and modified by their users – or the communities they affect – cannot promote autonomy, and inherently disempower workers in the production process. More specifically, we:

• Recognize how the term “open source” has become co-opted by corporations as a strategic site for no-cost development, platform lock-in and talent acquisition. We reject “open source” artifacts and AI models produced by technologies that require vast repositories of private training data collected by invasive means and unsustainable amounts of computing power to produce.
• Oppose technologies (like platform-based AI models) that enclose and privatize the intellectual commons by placing it behind an interface from which subscription rents can be extracted. Instead, we stand in favor of technological development that benefits a shared intellectual commons.
• Prefer interpretable technologies, which can be more readily understood and modified by users and workers than unnecessarily complex technologies.
• Stand by the right for individuals and communities to repair their own goods. The right to repair challenges corporate control and planned obsolescence, fosters communal knowledge sharing and technical repair skills, and reduces waste and resource consumption.
• Stand in favor of international technology and knowledge transfer, particularly with respect to medicine, agriculture, and other life saving technologies.
• Call for a guarantee that software developed with public money exists in the public domain – no tax dollars for proprietary platforms.
• Posit a nuanced understanding of the benefits and harms of copyright law, which may render personal data solely as an individual’s property that can be bought and sold. While copyright may be utilized by unions to fight against corporate usage of data without consent, its framing implicitly supports the notion of data as a discrete commodity and indirectly bolsters IP law. We conceive of data differently, not as an individual’s property to be bargained away but as a collective right to be protected.
• Call for organized socialists to move our data and organizing infrastructure towards platforms under our own control, built atop free and open source software, and away from the use of platforms owned and operated by capitalist firms hostile to our aims. We realize this by hosting a program of communal hack nights and repair spaces.