Instead, it a creative commons sort of community where people might create stuff for many different reasons, including just because they are bored or because they found a solution that worked for them and wanted to share and share alike. It is a highly libertarian concept.
Why can’t you do that now? Doesn’t this happen already?
I could start citing Corey Doctorow's rants on DRM squeezing out everybody, but that was not the point of this particular thread. I might talk about that when I have gotten something meta to the subject out of my system. After that, I would be glad to give you a Corey Doctorow rant.
I am tired of the offensive stereotype of communists as authoritarian Marxists, and I am tired of told I am talking nonsense and trolling people when it turns out I am
not an authoritarian Marxist in spite of identifying as a communist. We are not all authoritarian, and whether most people know it or not, it is possible for communism and capitalism to exist as part of the same economy. Just like Richard Stallman, I like
both! I am not going to choose because both of them are excellent ideas for different reasons.
If somebody is going to demonize communists, then I am going to speak up and say something.
Communism is not something that it's legitimate to demonize people over. You probably have communism on your phone. That's what Android is. It's based on open source, and the very idea of open source exists because of a man named Richard Stallman. Your phone's software exists partly because of a man that supported communism but who also supported capitalism, which is why somebody was able to put a comfortable interface on the software and put it on a device that you were willing to give them money for. You are carrying communism in your pocket.
Not all communism is exclusionary. In spite of being a communist, my positions on most policy issues are actually normal for a Democrat. I mean I have a nephew that has cystic fibrosis, so I am no foe of the welfare state that currently helps keep him alive. Even so, I really have non-extreme, non-scary views. Most of my views are really mainstream.
Communism is valid as a part of a balanced, complex, moderate, intellectually inclusive political philosophy. It really should not be used as a political punching-bag. It is wrong to take people on bad faith over it.
Nearly the only people that treated gay and transgender people like human beings, in the 1980's and 1990's, were people in the open source community. The reason they did so was that they were damn decent people. Communal labor brings out something noble in people. You cannot measure it in dollar signs. You measure it in the number of people that otherwise would have killed themselves out of loneliness and had nowhere else to turn. Even if communal labor is not always as lucrative as profit-motivated labor, it is a beautiful thing to be a part of. It is intrinsically good.