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The GPL is probably closer to socialism than communism. But both have the same fault anyways. Not that it's not a nice idea. Communism was also a nice idea, and countries that practice it are not 'evil' as a particular superpower's government would have you believe right now.

The examples you give acutally support Nick's argument. Let's take KDE for example. There may be many volunteers, but only a few key people (who have the luxury to spend time coding KDE) actually drive the development. So you see it's really not a democracy. Neither is gnome.

Debian may be, but Debian is also a perfect example of minimal work. It has thousands of volunteers, yet it's stable distribution is so outdated it's not even funny. The unstable version is just that, very unstable. Also, these people don't really create new products, rather they simply do mantinence type work. Much easier.

Let's look at some of the other 'stars' of the open source world. GNOME only became really good once Sun got in on the act. They helped introduce the HIG and many other usability features. OpenOffice was completely born of a proprietary company.

Many of the successul open source projects have main developers who are paid by companies dealing with propietary software or hardware. These people do most of the work. Look at linux, jfs, xfs, smp, all these were donated and were originally proprietary. The really free stuff? It's taken *years* to develop. Linux was started before or at the very least at the same time as windows NT. Look at where the two are now. The mere fact that GPL software has produces appoximately zero innovations should tell you something. Most projects are playing catchup perpetually.