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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Communism gets it name from everything being owned together, or by none at all if you wish. Material property is abolished. This is the essence of communism, not the historical materialism that David Adams makes a scornful recapitulation of.
Capitalism is essentially about amassing capital, i.e. property, and for this to be possible strong property rights are necessary. The aggressive strengthening of copyright and patent laws we are seeing in the US as well as in Europe is capitalism trying to strengthen its position in the information sector - companies and capitalists wish to be able to amass information in the same way as they can amass material property.
Free Software is the abolition of intellectual property (although of course it is manifested through laws supposed to uphold it). Anyway, software is shared in very much the same way as normal property would be in a communist state. Competition is replaced by cooperation, and innovation will thrive. And we all know it does, this is not a utopian dream, it is right there on your desk, life-controlling governments not included.
Obviously, in a otherwise capitalist economy, material areas will still be run in a capitalist fashion, and that is the real reason that businesses work with open source, i.e. Red Hat doesn't produce a linux distribution, it produces the service of making computers work with linux on them. This way free software can still work in the capitalist system, and this is obviously good because the life-controlling governmental power of capitalism is put to good use, providing the world with good software for free.
I think the really interesting question is what it would take to apply Free Software ideals to new areas, instead of doing it the other way around. Projects like wikipedia and filesharing is pushing the border, OpenCores is crossing it. What is next?