This thought came to me in the shower today. Open source checks most of the boxes. It is a collaborative, worker owned (develloper-owned) project, that tries to flatten hierarchy. Especially if you look at something like Debian ), which really tries to have a bottom-up structure.
Of course, there are exceptions, considering there are a lot of corporate open-source projects, that are not democratically maintained and clearly only serve the interest of the company, who created it (like chromium for example).
So I am mainly talking about community-oriented FOSS projects here.
And if you were to agree with my statement, would you say that developing FOSS software is advancing the goals of the anarchist / communist project, because it is laying the groundwork infrastructure needed for a new kind of economy and society?
Thought this could be an interesting discussion!
I think it's more of a socialist mindset that is spreading with FOSS, because it focuses it's workings on the common good, Most FOSS projects can be named socialist by nature; they encourage working together to create something bigger, something that doesn't let the small guy fall through the created network. I believe a lot of anarchistic workings are socialist at their core, and FOSS is an embodiment of these workings.