> Also, plenty gets written under scientific and research grants and
> such. I paid the rent for a couple years under such an arrangement.
> I'm pretty sure that's how the original internet software got written.
Most of that software got written by scientists, engineers, and programmers working in universities and Pentagon labs. Ironically, although Pentagon money funded much of the early Internet, many of the guy who programmed this stuff were opposed to the Vietnam war.
The free software movement and a significant amount of programming is based on anarchist principles and anarchist programmers. The latter have contributed significantly to projects such as Indymedia. I guess you could make the comparison between free software and communism on economic grounds, but anarchism is a more appropriate correlation because free software relies on cooperation, decentralization, sharing, egalitarian social relations and mutual aid.
I'm finishing this book on the computer industry in the 1960s and I'm more incensed as ever at assholes like Bill Gates who took all of this collective vision and privatized it for his own greed. No wonder the motherfucker is spending billions on charity to improve his personal image. At least contemporary computing and the Internet still retain most of that anarchic and countercultural spirit of the 1960s.
Chuck