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Free Can Mean Big Money - The Open Source Economy
Gentu writes "People are always accusing Open Source proponents of being communists, but an editorial by the OSNews publisher, ex-Red Hat employee David Adams, takes a critical look at whether Free and Open Source Software is really anti-capitalistic or is, in fact, only a product of the free market at work. Does wide availability of high quality, low cost software harm or help the world's economy?"
There's a BusinessWeek article today advising the Linux community and those in product development to drop GPL and release under BSDesque licenses in order to stay more business-friendly.
The notion of "From Each According To His Abilities, To Each According To His Needs" which is the core of Karl Marx's philosophy is also the core of Open Source ideals. Those of us who can code give away our code so that everyone who needs software can benefit.
The fact that the Cold War happened and 'communism' became a dirty word in the U.S. and other western nations doesn't make Open Source any less about ensuring that everyone can enjoy the fruits of the labor of the most talented without the necessity of enriching the producers of the software or discrimination against those that would not be able to afford software if it was proprietary and commercial.
First, I think that it is fundamentally wrong to assume that public works and benefits are somehow communist in the way that Communist governments exist today. This sort of thinking has been a way of attacking public sector projects in thinking that "I don't want my tax dollars paying for it."
Instead, it seems to me that we are talking about some sort of continuum between Capitalism and Socialism where the difference is that Socialism has a number of public works controls which help to redistribute wealth and keep in check the big business capitalism.
I use the term communism to refer to Soviet, Chinese, Eastern European, and Cuban communism. Whether or not they are the ideal is irrelevant. They are the examples of communist governments that we can reference. Communism in this perspective seems to be a socialist feudalism with state control and ownership of producers. This state control has limited utility and consequentially at some point one has to move to a person-based (corporations are artifical persons) ownership model.
Hence the move from Feudalism/Communism to Capitalism/Socialism seems to be a one-way road, provided that one only allows one ot consider a transition complete once it has really taken root. I.e. the family succession of elected offices in places like Singapore indicate that feudalist mentalities are still alive and well in the psyche of the citizenry.
The problem with open source from a capitalist perspective is that the means of production (in this case intellectual property) have become socialized, in the words of Marx. However, this is fundamentally different from Communism as I have defined it because socialized doesn't mean "owned by the state" but rather "owned by the producers and users." In other words this is a move towards community ownership which on the surface seems more like communism. To be fair to Marx he seemed to indicate that capitalist institutions such as corporations and the free market would likely continue to exist in his vision of communism.
I am willing to admit (as Wilhelm Reich quite strongly advocates) that Lenninism is NOT to be equated with the theories of Marx, and that Communist parties are simply wishful thinkers and daydreamers. In this theory cooperative businesses are the true manifestation of Marx's ideas of communism, but the term communism can't be used because of confusion with the communist party and the Soviet regime. He uses the term "Work Democracy" in his book "Mass Psychology of Fascism."
Of course what we have here is a strange way in which work democracy is implimented here where the "workers" including "corporations" own the means of production. This is something which could be equated with Marx's communism but bears no relation to the state-controlled Feudal political philosophy which has started in Russia during WWI. Indeed, when compared to the ideas of the "Communist Party," open source more closely resembles capitalism because it assumes no state ownership and the operation of a free market.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP