PDOS: A Manifesto for a Bloodless Revolution -------------------------------------------- PDOS is not merely a software project. It is a deliberate political and moral experiment. Its purpose is to demonstrate that a better system does not require illegality, violence, coercion, or seizure of power. It tests whether people who claim to oppose capitalism are willing to outgrow it using the freedoms it already provides. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. THE CORE PREMISE Capitalism, for all its faults, permits something historically rare: - voluntary association - legal construction of alternatives - nonviolent competition - open collaboration If capitalism is truly unjust, inefficient, or obsolete, then it should be possible to build something better on top of it, legally, and allow people to choose it freely. PDOS exists to test that claim. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. WHAT PDOS IS PDOS is: - public domain - non-owned - non-coercive - non-profit-driven - legally unencumbered No licenses. No gatekeepers. No rent. No permission required. It is a commons in the strongest possible sense. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. THE STRATEGY: A BLOODLESS REVOLUTION PDOS was designed as a revolution from within: - build superior systems instead of protesting inferior ones - replace monopolies through competence, not force - create collective ownership by construction, not decree - demonstrate socialism by practice, not theory No laws broken. No property seized. No violence justified "temporarily." Only work. If successful, such a system could grow, attract users, generate surplus, and fund further collective experiments -- all without coercion. That is what a bloodless revolution looks like. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. THE MORAL TEST PDOS does not ask for heroism. It asks for participation. If people truly believe in: - collective ownership - voluntary cooperation - shared responsibility then a project like PDOS should attract effort, creativity, and commitment. When it does not, something is revealed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5. WHAT PDOS EXPOSES PDOS has only two possible outcomes: 1. It is used -- proving that peaceful, legal, cooperative systems can be built inside capitalism. 2. It is ignored -- exposing that many who complain about the system do not actually want to build alternatives. In the second case, the failure is not technical. It is moral. Complaints are cheap. Construction is costly. PDOS separates those who want change from those who want identity, rhetoric, and grievance without responsibility. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 6. THE MOTIVATION THAT ACTUALLY WORKS Marx's formula requires a gun to produce contribution. One challenge in a Fidonet echo produced 30 years of public domain software. In the early days of online communication, before the internet existed in its current form, there was a technical bulletin board network called Fidonet. In a programming echo called C_ECHO, an American issued a challenge: he hadn't seen much public domain software coming out of Australia. That was all it took. Not ideology. Not collective duty. Not a belief in the commons for its own sake. A national challenge. Australia versus America. Who does more for the common good? The competitive instinct -- the same hardware that produces territorial wars and corporate monopolies -- pointed at the correct target instead. Public domain software started flowing immediately. PDOS came later, as the culmination of that commitment scaled to its logical endpoint: not just utilities and tools, but an entire operating system. Owned by no one. Available to everyone. Forever. A war fought with code, for a prize that belonged to the whole world. The socialist has a different account of his motivation. He claims to be moved by collective duty, by belief in the commons for its own sake, by something beyond mere self-interest or competition. His motivation is supposed to be purer than a national challenge in a bulletin board echo. His commitment is supposed to run deeper. PDOS was the test of that commitment. He didn't show up. The person motivated by competition -- not ideology -- built the commons. The person motivated by ideology built nothing. The war produced the output that the moral claim could not. This is not an argument that competition is the only motivation that works. It is an observation about which motivation actually produced the commons, and which produced a hat. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 7. WHY THIS HAS NOT HAPPENED There is no technical barrier to building a more cooperative, collectively owned digital infrastructure. There is no legal barrier to voluntary participation. There is no requirement for violence, coercion, or revolution. And yet, participation remains scarce. The simplest explanation is also the most uncomfortable: Not enough people actually want to build the world they claim to want. PDOS functions as a test of belief by construction. It does not argue for any ideology, nor does it require agreement with one. It simply offers a legal, nonviolent, voluntary opportunity to build an alternative and observes who shows up. When sustained effort, cooperation, and participation do not materialise, the result should not be explained away as a failure of technology, systems, or external suppression. It is evidence about humanity. In light of this, continued attempts to push, evangelise, or impose alternative economic systems are misplaced. Any system that assumes a level of collective motivation, discipline, or altruism that does not appear in practice will fail for the same reason, regardless of its name or theory. PDOS does not prove that a better world is impossible. It demonstrates that, with the humanity that actually exists, we should not assume that any system can reliably produce better outcomes than the one already in place. This experiment does not claim that large-scale cooperation requires no structure, incentives, or institutions. It demonstrates something prior to that: institutions themselves must be built, staffed, and maintained by people willing to contribute before power, salaries, or enforcement exist. Someone has to go first. If that willingness does not appear under conditions of freedom, legality, and low personal risk, it is not reasonable to assume it will appear later under more elaborate systems. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 8. THE SORE BACK PROBLEM Marx said: "From each according to their ability; to each according to their needs." It is a fine formula. Here is what the data shows when you apply it voluntarily: When contribution is voluntary, ability mysteriously evaporates. When consumption is available, need expands without limit. The Western socialist who will not contribute a line of code, a page of documentation, a translated readme, or a single afternoon of genuine effort to a freely available public domain commons -- that person has needs that are extensive and abilities that are, apparently, entirely consumed by a sore back. PDOS was the controlled experiment. Voluntary. Legal. No coercion required. The tools were there. The freedom was there. The commons was there. All that was missing was the people who claimed to believe in it. What we learned: "from each according to their ability" requires a state holding a gun to produce any backs that are not sore. Which means Marx's formula was always, in practice: "from each according to what we can force out of them; to each according to what the party decides." The experiment is over. The results are in. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 9. WHAT 1% OF 1% WOULD HAVE BUILT There are roughly 8 billion people on earth. Among them, a significant fraction claim to believe in collective effort, the common good, and alternatives to capitalism. Imagine if 1% of them -- 80 million people -- had contributed even 1% of what one person contributed to PDOS over 30 years. Not heroism. Not full commitment. One percent of one person's effort. A few weeks of genuine work per person, pointed at the public domain commons. What would exist? Not utopia. Nobody is promising utopia. But something. Better medical software available to clinics in the global south that cannot afford licenses. Better educational tools for schools that run on donated hardware. Better infrastructure for the people capitalism has actually failed -- not the Western socialist with the sore back, but the people he claims to be fighting for. A world measurably closer to the one the Che hat was supposed to represent. Not the promised land. Just something. Something real. Something built. Something that could not be taken away because it was owned by no one and available to everyone. Instead, we got squat. The people who could have built it were too busy explaining why capitalism was the problem, waiting for a state mechanism to force someone else to do the work, and nursing their sore backs. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 10. THE BIGGER THEY ARE There is an expression: the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Consider the gap. One person. No corporate backing. No institutional support. No salary. No comfortable Western lifestyle funding the revolution from a distance. Needs minimised to the breadline -- which is, incidentally, exactly what the Marxist formula requires. Contributing according to actual ability for 30 years. Living the formula. The Western socialist meanwhile had a comfortable income, a heated apartment, weekends, disposable time, and the full infrastructure of capitalism keeping him alive and connected while he explained why capitalism was the problem. He had more ability. He had fewer genuine needs. He contributed nothing. The person who actually lived "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" is the one they ignored. The person who maximised consumption and minimised contribution while wearing the hat is the one who claimed the formula as his creed. The gap between stated values and observed behaviour is not small. It is 30 years wide. It is a breadline versus a comfortable apartment wide. It is the difference between the person who built the commons and the person who couldn't be bothered to document it. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. They were very big. They fell very hard. They just haven't noticed yet. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 11. THE SPARK THEY WALKED PAST They claim to hate corporations. They claim to hate monopolies. They claim Microsoft's control of computing infrastructure is a symbol of everything wrong with capitalism. Here was the mechanism to break it. Not through regulation. Not through protest. Not through waiting for a government to act. Through building. A public domain operating system, freely available, that any individual or organisation could take, use, modify, and deploy without paying a cent to any corporation. What could have been organised on top of it: A non-profit -- or multiple non-profits -- funded by genuine monetary contribution from people who claimed to believe in collective ownership. Not a lot. Enough to pay developers. Enough to build the tools that the global south needed and could not afford to license from Microsoft. A socialist-run hospital, running on public domain software, owned by no corporation, accountable to its community. A proof of concept. A demonstration that the formula worked when people actually applied it. A network of collective experiments -- communes, cooperatives, community clinics, schools -- all running on a technical foundation that could not be taken away, bought out, or licensed into uselessness. All of it legal. All of it nonviolent. All of it inside the capitalist framework they claimed to be transcending. PDOS was the spark. Not the whole fire. Not the promised land. The spark -- the ignition point that required nothing but genuine commitment to the cause and the willingness to show up. They walked past it. For 30 years, the spark sat there waiting. They walked past it on the way to the protest, the tweet, the meeting where they explained why the system was broken, the comfortable apartment where they nursed their sore backs and their expansive needs. The spark is still there. The window is still open. The commons is still free. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 12. WHO WOULD BE ALLOWED TO LIVE There is a line from communist literature worth examining. The revolution, it says, is not about how many people need to be killed. It is about how many people will be allowed to live. The ones allowed to live are the true believers. The ones who genuinely hold the collective good above personal interest. The ones the revolution was fought for. Once the capitalists and the doubters are removed, the remaining population -- the authentic socialists -- will build the cooperative society that was always possible if only the system had permitted it. PDOS has already identified that population. They are the ones who, when presented with a free, legal, zero-risk opportunity to work for the common good, did nothing. No capitalist suppressing them. No system blocking them. No risk, no cost, no barrier. Just the work, and the choice of whether to do it. They chose not to. The communist promise is that eliminating the capitalists will release the cooperative human potential underneath. The PDOS experiment ran that test in advance -- the true believers, operating freely, with no capitalists in the room, no system to blame, no excuse available -- and the cooperative potential did not appear. Which means the gun that was supposed to become unnecessary once the true believers were in charge turns out to be just as necessary as before. The utopia populated by genuine believers in collective effort would be populated by the same people who could not translate a readme. The revolution eliminates the wrong target. The sore back is not a capitalist condition. It is a human one. PDOS did not just expose the Western social media socialist. It pre-falsified the endpoint the revolution was supposed to produce. The experiment is over. The results are in. The true believers failed the test before the killing started. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 13. CONCLUSION PDOS exists to make one claim unavoidable: "If you will not build a better world when you are free to do so, then your problem is not the system -- it is your unwillingness to work." This is not an argument against socialism. It is an argument against performative opposition. We could have had something closer to utopia. The tools were free. The freedom was real. The window is still open. Instead, we got squat. And the people who gave us squat are still wearing the hat. pdos.org -----------------------------------------------------------------------