Have you ever worked in a non-capitalist coding collective? How was it?

I did technical work for an anarchist collective in NYC during Occupy. Also a fantastic experience, although lots of people who weren't part of the group were very hostile about me being in it, so that sucked.

I wonder if there are any coops out there that are making good money organizing with horizontal structures like this. I don't think a lot of people even try it, but it's pretty cool.

I am starting one with partners - tng.coop , in Japan.

There are many others: - https://github.com/hng/tech-coops - https://patio.ica.coop/ - https://community.coops.tech/

And there are many more private and other active channels! Contact me for more info +81 90 6523 2640 yasu@yasuaki.com

5 years in the Chinese army. Wasn't fun.

For real though, what does that even mean?

I haven't but I did spend some time when I was younger trying to think of an incentive structure that would potentially appeal to some people.

It was fairly half-baked but the general idea was to get a group of people together in the same physical location and work together like a commune to provide for each others basic needs, (food, water, shelter, clothing etc...) this is really no different than most other communes in the world.

The difference being that these would be considered chores. The main form of work which would need to be done that would actually bring in resources would be some form of technical software work, where everyone in the group is expected to create/contribute to software projects. These projects and work could and should be sold for money, however the group itself is not a profit driven organization, any proceeds just go back into increasing the total wealth of the group.

I realized a bit later that this is really an Non-for profit organization with a few extra steps and caveats.

But the basic idea being:

- Group provides basic needs for you to code

- Resources from the coding work done is reinvested into the group.

Isn’t this basically what community driven open source software is all about? I know I've worked on and submitted patches to various OSS projects for free.

This probably isn't what you had in mind, but I found working for USDS (on projects for Medicare and CDC, mostly) fulfilling and sometimes exhilarating. Maybe what clicked with you about the CNG org you mentioned was its mission focus and lack of profit motive? B-Corps and government agencies are not collectives or co-ops, but you do get to work on problems that will never be profitable to solve.

They don't seem to mention it on their site, but Galois[1] is an employee-owned cooperative with an internal governance structure that reflects that mutual ownership. I don't work for them, but I've worked with them for the last four years and it's been great.

[1]: https://galois.com/

Yes, I've coded for free open-source projects.

I have not, but I know about Igalia [0]. They operate as a co-op and they work on open source software exclusively AFAIK.

[0] https://www.igalia.com/about/

Here in Austin, Texas, there's a cooperatively-owned software development and design business called Vulk Coop. They've hosted a series of meetups and happy hours for people to talk about the co-op model and how it relates. However, it's not anti-capitalistic, just worked-owned. Details at https://vulk.coop/ and https://www.meetup.com/Austin-Software-Co-operatives/

TBH I don't know why are there no small "consulting" companies structured like lawyer ones. I think the model makes a lot of sense.

Does such a thing even exist? What's the business model? Trust fundies?

Not sure if this counts, but made games throughout my teenage years. I mean I didn't really make the games, I was more the idea guy who pretended to do stuff.

The old site is still around. We used to set up our groups and post stuff we built there: https://create-games.com/

> I'm really curious about this.

It may seem tangential as it doesn't directly answer your stated question. But in keeping with the spirit of the technical aspect of hn discussions...

Your larger dipping into economics IMHO would be well served by keeping in mind how each particular system solves the freeloader problem aka the tragedy of the commons. IMHO that's the biggest and least often addressed real world problem when dealing with actual flesh and blood humans and not philosophical humans.

That'll tell you how well a particular system will scale with size of that system, what it does with people acting in a legal way, in a way that benefits themselves in the short term, but isn't good for the rest of the group in the long term.

I'm working for the local university in their software development branch. I'm not based in the US might be relevant info. So far, it's pretty good! Pay isn't great, but acceptable for me. Our dev machines are a lot less powerful than I had thought they would be, but we're running Debian/Ubuntu on them with IntelliJ Idea for Java EE development. They feel a lot more responsive than the corporate Windows 10 and Visual Studio stack we had for C#, so I'm not complaining.

I'm personally involved in our open science projects, the other projects are all for internal use. Overall I greatly enjoy not needing to squeeze profit out of what we do :)

Motion Twin, the team behind the Dead Cells, is a worker-owned anarchist cooperative:

> WE'RE ALL EQUAL and we wanted that to show, both in the way our games are made and in the way we organise ourselves. So we chose to create a cooperative company. Everyone has a say and we all take home the same salary.

http://motion-twin.com/

Cng sounds cool. "Code Not Guns" is probably inspired by "Food Not Bombs" which coincidentally I heard of only fairly recently.

You can also checkout all the "Code For America" organizations for local nonprofit government coding projects. I don't know if it will fit your anarchist philosophy but it would certainly help to have more volunteers to help connect citizens to their local US governments.

I've been in some nonprofits and in a university. They had good and bad points like anything else. They were different from working in industry. Also was in a corporate research lab for a while. That was also different than being in a place that actually worked on products. I got something out of it on each occasion, but it depends on what you're looking for at any given point in your life.

Similarly interested in experience with profit sharing contract work

It's silly.

Coding is not exists alone in vacuum. You in any case need to eat something, to live somewhere, even considering computers/internet connection are free.

So, even when live in USSR, where ALL where non-capitalist, I rely on somebody, who pay me, and/or feed me, for some non-altruistic reasons.

In reality, money made things much easier, because you could just do work, got money and nothing more.

But if work done not for money, appear politics, relations, psychiatry and lot of other difficult things to consider.

I understand the concept of "coding collective", but what would be the characteristics of a "non-capitalist" company/whatever?

How would they survive and pay their workers?

My father worked for socialist country in 1980ties. They were still using punch cards, 8" floppy was just being introduced.

Basically 20 years technologically behind West on 1/20th salary.