This myth has been floating around ever since Eric Raymond wrote his responses to the Halloween documents, which have an overoptimistic and simplistic view of open source, as a variant of socialist (or, to be more exact, vulgar Marxist) interpretation of software development. Raymond further expounded on his Marxist fashion for software development in Homesteading the Noosphere:
…ultimately, the industrial-capitalist mode of software production was doomed to be out competed from the moment capitalism began to create enough of a wealth surplus for many programmers to live in a post-scarcity gift culture.
Bob Metcalfe famously called Open-Source “utopian balderdash”, comparing its concepts to ideological fads such as communism, the back-to-the-earth movement, and organic gardening. His contention is that giant multi-national corporations are necessary to software development and that Linux is going to, like communism did, fall at the feet of trans-national capitalism.
Okay, so we can agree that Eric Raymond is probably a socialist, though he has not said so explicitly. Ditto Richard Stallman, who hits many of the same Marxist talking points as Raymond. Neither of these two speak for the totality, or even the majority, of Open-Source or Linux programmers and users. Let’s leave them where they are and look at whether the ideas of Open-Source and/or Linux are communist, at their core.
Far from being communistic, open source development most resembles the very engine of the impressive success of Western science and engineering; Applied Science.
To quote the far more elegant Bryan Pfaffenberger:
When you become a scientist, you give up the quest for great worldly wealth. You get a decent wage, to be sure. But you don’t capitalize on your discoveries–you give them away. You publish, and reveal all. You don’t get a penny from the journals, either. In fact, some of them make the author pay the typesetting charges!
What’s the payoff? There are probably as many motivations as there are scientists. Some are curious; they just can’t stop thinking about why the edge of a waterfall curls, or why the Milky Way’s arms form those big, elegant spirals. Others are big kids who can’t wait to get into the lab for another rewarding day of exquisite, exploratory fun. Still others care very deeply about the value and meaning of science. In a recent series of lectures, physicist Freeman Dyson reveals the source of his commitment to science: a quest for ways that science and technology can contribute to social justice, the elimination of poverty, and the preservation of the Earth’s environment.
I’ve never heard anyone call science communism. It has absolutely nothing to do with communism. In fact, communists don’t like scientists very much. Scientists are too hard to control. They care too much about truth.
University scientists aren’t the only people doing research, of course. For-profit corporations engage in research and development. But the consequences illustrate precisely whats at stake. Proprietary knowledge doesn’t get disseminated unless doing so enhances the corporation’s bottom line. That’s understandable, but we need an alternative. In that most capitalist of all countries, the U.S., a bipartisan Congressional consensus supports public investment in university research and the creation of knowledge for everyone, including for-profit companies. This isn’t communism; it’s common sense.
So what’s at stake with computer software? Plenty. Computer technology is partly responsible for the longest sustained economic boom in U.S. history. It has helped establish U.S. economic, technological, and political dominance in a fractious and dangerous world. It promises to help solve the most vexing problems now facing us: the demand to create efficient, non-polluting energy sources, to deal with the ravages of world hunger, to unlock the mysteries of cancer. It’s vital that computer knowledge remains an open public possession, but that’s not what’s happening. Right now, for-profit computer firms are falling all over themselves trying to patent even the silliest snippets of code, and an unbelievably myopic U.S. Patent Office is giving away the store. (You’ll learn more about the software patent crisis in an upcoming column.) Computer systems that are vital to public safety and welfare are operating with closed, commercial code, which is loaded with unknown (and unknowable) bugs. Consider the USS Norfolk lying dead in the water for two hours after the failure of its onboard NT systems, and you’ll get the idea.
The Open Source movement won’t wipe out commercial software, any more than it will create an important and valuable alternative. Computer software is too important to leave to for-profit corporations. There needs to be a balance between publicly accessible knowledge and proprietary, for-profit knowledge, and the Open Source movement is lighting the way.
If you still think this is pie-in-the-sky utopianism, maybe you should go talk to kids in a Mexican school. Without computer literacy, they don’t stand a chance in today’s global economy. Thanks to GNOME, an open source desktop system for Linux, the Mexican government is saving $124 million that would have otherwise lined Microsoft’s coffers, and it’s spending the money on computers instead. Call it communism, if you like. I call it progress.
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Hmm..Linux communist..I must have missed that myth. Was it a Microsoft lackey who started that rumor??
It makes the rounds, mostly amongst small-business folk who have had an allergic reaction to ESR. The Bob Metcalfe strain of the myth (utopian balderdash) is from 1999 and has mostly gone away, but is worth noting for how it relates to the other.