[OS:N:] RE: N:] Open Source as a form of Anarcho-Communism?

["Paul Fitz" <pfitz dodo com au>]

Hi everyone,

I'm writing a paper at university anout the philosophy behind the creation
of open source material.  It's actually a case study, using linux as the
primary case in question.

The main idea is that the Open source community is actually a mini
anarch-communist community existing within the Internet - for a number of
reasons - please read below.

I'd like to hear some thoughts/feedback if anyone has time.

My main reasoning is -

Anarcho-communism disregards Lockean concepts of private property, which
Open source does (to an extent) by opposing intellectual copyright -
copyleft instead of copyright.

Open sourcers reject capitalist ideology of supply-demand economics, open
source programmers actively give their Intellectual property away - to 1 or
10'000'000 people.

Anarcho-communism places a great emphasis on the workers owning the means of
production.  In the case of the Internet, this would be the networks, and
software running on them (OS's - Linux, servers - apache, languages - php,
perl etc., databases -postgres mysql etc)  Open source shares the belief
that the users should own the electornic means of production, as oposed to a
corporation owning the networks and software to access them.

Communist belief endorsing Good of the all over the few - All can benefit
from open source product, only relatively affluent can afford to even use
microsoft and even then, the source code is copyrighted intellectual
property

In ideal anarchist communities, the collective creates enough material to be
independent from the states, open source is actively creating enough
electronic material to be free of capitalist endorsed proprietary software.

However, open source communities are also technocracies (to an extent -
governed by technicians: a social system in which scientists, engineers, and
technicians have high social  standing and political power).

The open source commnity appears to be a 'gift economy' - where giving away
code/ideas/advice is highly desirable and valuable. The more code and
information the user creates/reproduces and gives to others, the more valued
they are in the community.

It seems that, if the open source community is a mini-anarcho-communist
community, it co-exists within a larger capitalist owned structure called
the Internet.  It actually depends on it for it's existence to an extent -
would Linux be where it is today without the Internet?  It is unlikely - the
net has allowed hundreds of thousands of motivated programmers/testers/users
to help develop and refine many forms of open source software.

Pretty basic thoughts at this stage, just curious to see what others think.
Disagree/agree whatever, it's all useful :)

Cheers,
Paul