>I think it's useful to think about this in more general terms:
>Open source software is people collaborating for mutual benefit.
>In these general terms, the open source software mentality
>is applicable to most sectors of the economy that Doug
>mentions above. I agree that the specific model of collaboration
>may not transfer easily, but the noble socialist vision that
>we can effectively collaborate for mutual benefit does apply to
>these other areas (e.g., food co-ops, public transportation,
>computer networks in public schools, etc).
I agree with this part - open source is a way of saying that cooperation can work at least as well as competition, and that IP protection isn't a prerequisite for innovation. You can make a similar point about how wired the Scandinavian countries are, too - stodgy old social democracies can be more high-tech than Anglo-American paradises of laissez-faire. But a bunch of geeks exchanging lines of code isn't going to change the larger world very much.
Doug