Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
You can be communist without sucking stalins cock or looking massacres and going "we didnt do and if we did it wasnt that bad, and if it was, they probably deserved it." Its the uncritical idolation of the dictatorial aspects of communist projects that i object to.
Yeah, about a year ago when all the "wow, lemmy really feels like an edgy early internet discussion forum" threads were popping up, I think people forgot that those early forums were just eternal flame wars between communists and anarchists.
Communism didn't invent empathy, humanism, solidarity, freedom or free sharing; it probably grew from there, and other things like FOSS can grow from there without being communist.
Yeah I didn't mean that FOSS was born out of communism, I believe culturally/antropologically speaking is more a direct product of the hippie movements from the 60s.
What I meant is that FOSS is aimed at "giving the means of production back to the people" and "rejecting the privatization of intellectual property" (Stallman talked about those concepts in many interviews) and those are of the core principles in Marx's philosophy.
I know that for some people "communism" can be a trigger word, but there's a big difference between a philosophy and an authority.
Also "empathy, humanism, solidarity...": have you ever interacted with people on GitHub?