Linked by David Adams on Mon 16th Aug 2004 17:44 UTC
I read something in one of the comments for an OSNews posting a couple weeks ago that sent me thinking. It wasn't an original or profound thought. In fact, it's a rather commonly-held opinion that happens to be quite misguided. It's an opinion summed up by the "open source = communist" meme that gets thrown around in thousands of flamewars all over the internet. In this essay, I will explore why this idea is wrong and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of economics.
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Open Source itself is not equal to communism, however some of the prevalent OSI licenses are. That's a huge part of the problem. Most people equate the GPL and OSS, which is unfortunate.
The GPL, and it's little sibling, the LGPL are both communistic in approach and intent in the purest sense of the word. They not only engender a community based approach to software, (If you modify/use it, you must contribute your efforts back into the community), they also prevent a 3rd party from using derivative works as anything but GPL.
Other OSI licenses, are in fact very good alternatives. MIT/X11, BSD, and others benefit everyone, but do not have the clauses that make the Communism accusation so bloody accurate when applied to the GPL.
I'm speaking for myself, and for example, I use PostgreSQL, and have made commercial contributions on behalf of corporate users to PostgreSQL, whereas I avoid MySQL like the plague, for this very reason. I cannot risk the intolerance of the GPL license that applies to the MySQL client libraries.