One definition of the proletariat is the class of people that have only their labor to support them, i.e. don’t own the “means of production”, classical factors of production including instruments of labor and subjects of labor. I would assert that we have entered an era where a large segment of production centered around information has made this concept obsolete. The means of production (or MoP) of a software based product today is free, at least from the perspective of a developer with an idea and the skills and desire necessary to implement it. The tools required to develop quality software can be accessed or downloaded with zero monetary investment. This includes development of enterprise scale applications. There are no licensing or maintenance costs associated development using the JDK, and like it or not, Java/EJB has a commanding lead in the enterprise marketplace over it’s closest competitor, Microsoft’s .NET. Serious relational databases now exist in the open-source world – MySQL and PostgreSQL for example. World class IDEs exist for Java development that may be used and extended, free of charge. The documentation needed to learn to develop software with these tools is freely available on the Internet. Access to the Internet is free at most public libraries as well as the coffee shop down the street.

According to the MoP article on Wikipedia as it existed on 20100107, when the workers control the MoP directly, it embodies the pure ideal of socialism:

“In the pure ideal of socialism, such as that ‘communism’ was/is supposed to be, the MoP are controlled by the workers production collectives directly. In fact this situation has only been historically realized temporarily such as in the Israeli kibbutz or the early Soviets before the entrenchment of the communist party as a ‘New Class’, or in isolated or preliminary form such as in the final phase of the Second Spanish Republic, or various experimental utopian communities.”

If this is the case, it may well be that the open-source community accomplished what the Soviet Union could not. Perhaps such a “utopian community” now exists in cyberspace. When it comes to information based products, and we live in an information age, the MoP now rests in the hands of the workers. Development environments, libraries, frameworks, source control systems, collaboration tools, issue/defect management systems – are are freely available under license agreements no more restrictive than the GPL or BSD licenses. Anyone with sufficient will and vision can produce and market a product to the entire planet. Some may argue that it takes considerably more, and this kind of opportunity is only available to members of the Bourgeoisie, since there’s no way to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to bend the available tools and infrastructure to your ends without considerable investment of capital in the first place. That’s not my experience, and I’m more than willing to debate the issue. Any resourceful “potential programmer” can find all they need at their fingertips – including tutorials and a strong support community. All that’s really needed is a recognized need and the willingness to pursue it’s solution.