"Governance by consensus amongst equals is always superior to dictatorship."

Free software isn't about communism, and it's certainly not about freedom
from capitalism. It's about freedom from dictators. Who decides a person's 
fate? Who has the final say in the future of the individual, or the society?
When a single individual or organization controls the fate of the masses, 
a socity is no longer a democracy.

The GNU Public license is not anti-capitalism: it's anti-dictatorship.
To make the code freely available to everyone means no entity has
contol over artificially limited resources. Land is a physically limited
resource. So are coal, lumber, and metal. There is only so much of
these things, and in a way we are self-imposing a rationing process
by attaching a price tag to them.

What are the raw materials?

A hammer costs more than the sum of its parts. Why? Because there is
the hidden cost of human labor. What is this hidden labor we're paying
for? When we look at what labor is actually being done, how much 
overhead are we paying?

In the days of blacksmiths, the labor costs was more direct. There was
a blacksmith who had direct access to the raw materials--obtained them
himself, and constructed the hammer. Later the concept of an apprentice
may have caught on and become standardized. Eventually we would also
see a separation of labor: obtaining the raw materials and using the
raw materials to construct objects. A third labor would grow out of
this: transportation of the raw materials from the source to those
who use them. Of course this transportation cost would eventually
rear its head in any case, as long as the resource was geographically
limited and people were not.

[Air at STP, for example, is one of the 
few resouces that historically could not have a transportation cost
associated with it because it existed in equal quantities pretty much
everywhere (with space and undersea exploration, this is no longer
entirely true)]

(1) With raw materials that are not geographically ubiquitous, there 
is the labor cost associated with transporting them.

(2) For raw materials that are not easily found or accessed, there are 
the labor costs assiciated with finding and/or accessing them.

(3) There is the labor cost of transforming the raw materials into a
useable product.

(4) At any stage, there are the costs associated with the use of
products that exist due to such a process.

And then there are the costs of management.

I'm going to sit over here and write code. I have access to the raw
materials, indeed I have _created_ some of the raw materials, and I 
have the skills to do things with them. If you find this work useful
you may take it. If you feel generous, make a little donation to my
well-being.

Imagine a early smithy in a similar situation: I'm going to sit over
here and make hammers. I like to do it. I enjoy the hike into the
mountains to find the iron. I enjoy the roar of the furnace, and 
the weight of the hammer. I make hammers because I like to do it.
I give them away. I take apprentices freely: I teach my skills
to all who wish to listen. What I ask in return is a contribution;
a voluntary contribution to my 
some way, to my well-being. It could be anything--a dollar, a can of
vegetables, 


Closed-source software is about creating resources that can only be
used by a single group or individual. Open-source software is about
creating resources that can be used by anyone. Closed-source software
is the generation of an artificial scarcity of resources, to which a 
single group has exlusive access.

Imagine if 1/10 of world's population were to run a Linux operating 
system, and these people made a (average) voluntary contribution of, 
say, a penny a year to the core development team. This would be
$300,000/year. At $50k/person (a reasonable salary expectation),
this would pay six developers. Six developers is about how many 
there are now. In other words, Linux should be able to easily fund
itself.


Why do we allow closed bodies to control our fates? Why do we blindly
follow the visions of the people we trust the least? Exclusive "standards"
include:

Direct3D (Microsoft)       ---         OpenGL
XML/HTML/xyzML (W3C)       ---          ???