On Sun, 30 Jul 2000, you wrote: > http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/12266.html > > While I don't agree with anything else he says, the open source model *is* > pretty much communism... "Communism (n) A theoretical economic system characterized by the collective ownership of property and by the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members." If anything, the GPL (for example) is THE most capitalistic license available. (Take an econ class.) An fair/balanced/open/whatever market is defined as one where there is no entry barrier (read: microsoft) to market (and a couple other things). Open source (at least, some licenses of that set) actually ensures a low (or nothing) entry barrier to market, since everyone has an equal chance at starting with the lowest common denominator, say, the Linux kernel. After that, whatever profit you wish to make is up to you. The government has nothing to do with it. It's not a political setup. There is no collective ownership (under communism, the government controls everything). Labor is not organized across the institution: if I'd rather work on disk I/O than ethernet drivers, then I work on disk I/O. If I'd rather sell support for Linux than program for it, then I sell support. QED. Open source is not communism. John -- # John Madden weez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx ICQ: 2EB9EA # Sys-Admin / Webmaster, Avenir Web: http://avenir.dhs.org # LANdb: Network Admin Database - http://avenir.dhs.org/landb/ # NCPweb: Web-based frontend to ncpfs - http://avenir.dhs.org/ncpweb/ # Linux, Apache, Perl and C: All the best things in life are free!