Traditional, Cold War-style communism is dead in Russia and the former Soviet Union but Marxist-Leninist communist parties still hold power around the world. In India, for example, the Communist Party of India-Marxist leads state governments in Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura. Those three states have a combined population of around 114 million people who have repeatedly elected in a majority communist government in their states.

Why this is remotely meaningful for the topic of this website is that the CPIM endorses free software in their newly-published “Draft Political Resolution For 19th Party Congress”. The document is ferociously anti-American and goes into great detail about imperialism, climate change, centralization of wealth and a bunch of other topics. And, it talks about free software, copyrights and patents:

Open access to scientific and technological knowledge is critically important to developing nations. The information technology sector and the free software movement have shown that new technologies and methodologies can be developed by cooperative communities without monopoly ownership – either through copyrights or patents. There is a need to develop similar ways of promoting “science/knowledge commons”, across many different scientific and technological disciplines, like biotechnology and drug discovery.

Regardless of the CPIM’s communist ties, the policy position expressed here is increasingly shared amongst “globally dissident” political parties and organizations all over the developing world. And they aren’t all communists … populist and nationalist and social democratic parties in developing countries are promoting information freedom in the software engineering world and beyond. Will the concepts that drive the free software movement fully make the leap into other science and engineering disciplines? And will it be the massive majority of the world — the billions of people who live in developing countries — who push us all in that direction, moved into action out of life-and-death necessity?

While this free software connection to an anti-American, Marxist group will be used by free software’s naysayers as evidence of something horrible about us, what is expressed here is an example of the growing global battle over freedom of information. Developing countries are an enormous demonstration of the reality of the practical and ethical imperative of free software and its counterparts in other realms of human knowledge.