Octavio Alvarez has written:
> That could be the reason behind your analogy with communism, which turns
out to be out of bounds. The Free Software community is > not against
trade or capitalism at all. Maybe some individuals do, but that's
another story. In fact, Free Software is legally based on > Copyright law.
When I compared free software to communism I did not mean anything wrong about it so I apologize if that insulted anybody. I realize the word has a very negative "shade" for many people. What I had in mind were the principles that stood at the beginning of communism - not the twisted "implementations" that we could - and still can - see in some countries. Namely it is:
1) Cooperation of many on a common goal/product
2) Free distribution of the product to anyone (sometimes only inside the community but not always as is the case with debian)
Communism can work in some instances - take a look at monasteries for example - often they are examples of a working communism, but that is relatively small scale. I just wanted to point out that this never worked on a LARGE scale, at least when the community is also supposed to reversely support all its contributors - because their life might depend on it.
Cheers,
Jan