Feature:Who is the Software Communist?

Philipp Koehn wrote in with a piece addressing something that always seems to come up any time you start talking about free software. His piece is called Who is the Software Communist. It's a pretty interesting read, although I suspect that most readers will disagree with it. I figure we'll hear some opinions on this one.

The following essay was written by Slashdot Reader Philipp Koehn

Who is the Software Communist?

In the debate about open source software the term 'communism' comes up quite freuently. The funny thing is that both sides accuse each other of being the red danger. So what is going on?

Communism is this nice idea that a human society should not be ruled by greed and egoismus, but rather by everybody contributing an equal amount of work and sharing the results. Famous society hacker Karl Marx made the blue print, and we tried it. Now, after millions of people masacred, demoralized, and empoverished, it doesn't seem such a good idea after all.

One problem is: to insure equal and distribution everything has to be centrally planned by someone. Descisions are handed down just like by Bill Gates' Kremlin in Redmond: The proclamation of standards and software to be used from the Microsoft politburo. Leaving the trade press busy guessing the next steps of the big brother, but not questioning them.

So here we are the software freedom fighters, bringing back the right to speak up and tearing down the Berlin Wall of non disclosure agreements and closed source code. Winning back the power to the marketplace of ideas (or bazaar of ideas, if you want). Fighting the evil empire that is set to enslave us.

But there is also the other side of communism: the original idea of sharing, the distribution of goods to whoever needs them. And here the history lesson turns sour: The failure of communism indicates that this does not work. Most people don't want their equal share, and give without profiting. They want to have more. They want better cars, better houses and more shiny desktops than their neighbors. In this light the open source community is suddenly the ideal communist society that never worked on a large scale. It is too easily ripped apart by the capitalist world with its cheesy marketing appeal and cell phone envy.

So this will haunt the future of open source. The current idealism will not sustain. Historically, every spiritual movements is consequently taking over by people who take it for granted and use it for their advantage. Or, as put in "Trainspotting" more generally: everything ultimately turns to shit.

Right now we are still in the spiritual phase of the movement, with the main motivation being to build up the wave. Every big company domino that falls to Linux is greeted by cheer and excitement. Soon it will be everywhere. And then?

Cold realism will kick in. The most likely exploit of Linux will be in the field of distributions. Red Hat? Caldera? Suse? Debian? Well, nobody got ever got fired for choosing IBM Linux - of course with added value and glitzy marketing. Linux might shift away the power from Microsoft, but only into other - only argueable better - hands. Will the world be a better place? Maybe slightly, but this revolution, too, will eat its children.