The usually rather tacky cnet has an excellent piece by Joe Firmage, who I’ve never previously heard of but is apparently an ex-VP of Novell who was involved in a key part of the whole SCO 0wns Linux debacle.
The model of open science is “communistic” in the sense of community ownership–or rather community stewardship. But innumerable highly successful organizations and institutions in America are founded upon the ideal of community stewardship–including our democracy itself.
The downfall of communism was due to state control by totalitarians–an attribute embodied by today’s commercial software industry far more than by the emergent open-source science of information technology.
