I'm surprised there hasn't been more conversation about the public good nature of software and informational goods generally. The choice seems to be between treating software as either:
(i) Private property: Generating commercial incentives to create software through property rights regimes (copyright, patents, etc.) but not giving it to the many who value it but value it less than the profit-maximizing price; or
(ii) Public property: Selling/distributing software at marginal cost (essentially zero) but with the consequent lower incentives for producers to produce it.
OSS is the public property route. A key tenent of Marxism was the call to abolish private property. In that sense, the charge that the open-source software movement is Marxist seems quite accurate.
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I'm surprised there hasn't been more conversation about the public good nature of software and informational goods generally. The choice seems to be between treating software as either:
(i) Private property: Generating commercial incentives to create software through property rights regimes (copyright, patents, etc.) but not giving it to the many who value it but value it less than the profit-maximizing price; or
(ii) Public property: Selling/distributing software at marginal cost (essentially zero) but with the consequent lower incentives for producers to produce it.
OSS is the public property route. A key tenent of Marxism was the call to abolish private property. In that sense, the charge that the open-source software movement is Marxist seems quite accurate.
But this is not a very interesting claim.