[plug] Open Source and Communism

[Leon Brooks]

There have been a couple of comments linking Open Source and Communism bandied 
about recently, so here are a couple of points have have pre-pondered (ie 
they are preponderous points) before the topic comes up.

 * Open Source is going to happen anyway - whether or not it is
   government funded/sponsored/legislated and regardless of the
   philosophy behind it - for financial reasons. It's sad that most
   people diving into it seem to be blind to its more important
   attributes.

 * Open Source is different to Communism in several important ways.
   The most obvious is that when you share your cow's milk, you have
   less milk, but when you share your software's source, you end up
   with *more* software.

 * The second most obvious is that in Communism as she are practiced,
   control is centralised; in Open Source - particularly the GPLish
   flavours - control is carefully and deliberately decentralised.
   Most successful projects operate in `benevolent dictator' mode,
   but by their very nature what little control they have is purely
   by mutual assent.

   In point of fact proprietary software is closer to Communism in
   this regard, and Open Source closer to Anarchism.

 * Communism's theoretical basis is `from each according to his
   ability, to each according to his need' but Open Source's paradigm
   more closely resembles `from each according to his need to solve a
   problem, to each according to his ability to use a search engine'.

   If that needs explaining: the more you need a solution, the more
   inclined you will be to adapt or start an OSS project to provide
   that solution. The better able you are to drive a search engine,
   the more likely you will find the most appropriate pre-existing
   solution.

Cheers; Leon