Open-source and Communism

Most of you reading this may want to ridicule me saying what an eerie thought!!! I ridiculed myself too and ended up deleting my draft post on this that I had started writing sometime last week. Finally, I decided to write about it.

Definition of communism: Communism is a socioeconomic structure that promotes the establishment of a classless, stateless society based on common ownership of the means of production and property in general.
Open-source is also similar. People work together towards building an open-source software and they get rewarded for the same. They use other open-source software and at the same time their software may be used by others. This way they have a common goal regardless of their individuality and they have a joint ownership of the software. The theory is that this collaborative process encourages innovation and decreases bugs by increasing the number of people with a stake in the project.

I consider open-source to be a fast developing, prominent, cost-effective and efficient force in today's world. Similar to any software project, adequate planning and management is essential for the success of any open-source project/product. Open-source promotes platform independence and decoupling.

Leading corporations including SAP and Microsoft have openly expressed their reservations against open-source movement. A CEO of a big corporation even went on to name open-source operating system Linux "a cancer". But companies like Red Hat, Sun and many others have not only benefited but made profits by being open-source companies. Many of us have already given up on IE and started using Firefox as their primary browser - which is again an open-source product.

I am no expert on communism and neither I am a communist nor I believe in communism more that democracy. Whether open-source is communism or not is very debatable topic; but at least they are comparable. They have similarities and share some of the fundamental principles. I currently work on an open-source project and that may have influenced my thought process. I am a firm believer of open-source and looking forward to use(and build) many more efficient open-source software in future.

Cheers !!!