<more_rambling>
Frankly, I've always felt the comparisons of open source to communism show a distinct lack of understanding of the environment from which the ideas of open source sprang.
Richard Stallman is an academic and a computer scientist and it is from within that environment that the methodology of open source was developed. As someone who has worked in the field of the sciences, I can attest to the fact that scientific progress occurs most efficiently when information can be exchanged without any restrictions. This is the whole point of scientific journals, and the underlying motivation of the "publish or perish" mantra in academia. If you are a researcher at a university and you aren't publishing your work, then you aren't contributing and you don't deserve the support of your institution.
Stallman adapted the methodology used for at least the last 3 centuries by the scientific community to the software development world and called it open source. There is nothing inherently Marxist about that. If people want to make such comparisons, that's fine, but if they do so, they are missing the point *and* failing to recognize that the ideas that open source came from pre-date Marx by at least 200 hundred years, probably longer. Open source is not, nor was it ever intended to be a model of a socio-economic system. The point was to generate better code that is available to everyone to improve and extend, nothing more, and nothing less.
</more_rambling>
Cheers,
Rod
On 5/18/06, Victor Odhner <vodhner@cox.net> wrote:
<ramble>
Free Software does indeed have some strong resemblances
to classic Marxism. What makes this possible, in the field of
software, is that a knowledge resource can be replicated
indefinitely, so we can share something and still have it.
Not so with physical resources: it's always a trade-off.
In the Marxist definition, Capitalism is also a central control
of the means of production, only it's for the sake of the Bad
Guys, while State Socialism is for the sake of the Good
Guys. As Orwell said, all animals are equal, only some
animals are more equal than others. Owning things (or
managing them) gives us control, and people tend to like
being "more equal than others". But some concentration
of power can lead to efficiencies ... within reason.
An "owner" can be like Linus, or like Bill.
We are now seeing excessive concentration of power in
the hands of corporations, which lots of people see as OK
because they are providing us with bread and circuses.
But the downside is getting more obvious, so I'm confident
the pendulum will swing, and Free Software is part of that.
Constructive, generous, altruistic motives are a good thing.
Selfish motives get a lot of stuff done too. It's all about
balance.
</ramble>