Comment by suraci
2 days ago
It feels really odd seeing Engels' quotes used like this.
The focus of Engels' criticism when he made these statements was on *capitalist production relations*, where capitalists control the means of production and obtain profits by exploiting the surplus labor time of workers. This is precisely what DeepSeek and open-source initiatives are challenging. They are turning the means of production from the private property of capitalists into public property.
I hope you did not intentionally misquote this passage.
Free Software is not the same as expropriation. It's perhaps more the social-democratic smoke mirror kind of thing than lifting the dependency.
Regardless of free software, capitalists control the means of production and obtain profits by exploiting the surplus labor time of workers.
Free software may make it more obvious though, at least for some.