I find this comparison rather stupid. Not that the author or the commenters are stupid, but the arguement.

Capitalism and communism are both economic models (they're NOT political ideologies) and in essence, all economic models base themselves on on fundamental assumption - resources are limited.

Oil has a certain value because it's needed by so many people. If NOBODY needed oil it would essentially be useless and valueless. Capitalism implies that those with resource X (that has value) can find the point where they can exchange an amount of resource Y for X - that differences in forms of capital cause fluidity and economic growth.

Communism bases it's belief that the vectors for transfer (the people) ultimately create economic opportunity. For instance, a ton of insanely wealthy people tend not to spend money when they're bedridden. By spreading capital to many many vectors (all citizens) it enables smaller transactions to be common place, and the sum of the smaller transactions creates more signifigant growth then the less frequent but large scale capitalist transactions.

The flaw with comparing software libre with either is that information isn't a limited resource. My use of oil deprives you of it but my use of information doesn't deprive you of that information. Because the information can instantly be duplicated without any form of loss, it has a capital value of nothing - like air was 100 years ago.

Something with no value doesn't fit in well with any economic model.

The problem most American's have is that they have blind faith in Capitalism and fail to see that it is as broken as Communism. Left to itself Capatalism becomes a snake that eats it's own tail. Only by combining the best features of Capatalism and Communism/Socialism will you really get an optimal system. It's all a question of resource allocation with the goal of always maximizing the increase of the number of resources available to our society over large periods of time.

Some ways we create more resources is by educating each other and by creating tools that make our work more effective. Open source does both of these with very little penalty in the short term as to how many resources are available. The only real cost is the time it takes to develop the code and write documentation and much of that is done either as part of another job or as leisure time.

Of course most, misstaken, Capatalists only look at the short term benefit to themselves and not at the total benefit to society so they think of sharing as a bad thing. They don't want the competition because they aren't up to competing. They fail to see that by investing in society as a whole we increase resources, increase innovation, and improve the quality of life all around which in the long term means they can have more and that in fact that we can all have more.

On the other hand the problem with Socialism and Communism is that they do a poor job of allocating the resources we do have. You give to the greater good but as a whole there is less to give to the greater good because resources are so poorly allocated. This just ends up winding down to very little resources being moved around with most people unable to help create more resources. Not a good situation.

By sticking to Capitalist concepts on the whole while mixing in ideas like sharing, improving the quality of life, improving education, and thinking about long term advantages as a society we can all benefit greatly. Open source is a movement that is leading the way in integrating these concepts into our society. I wouldn't snear at efforts to improve quality of living though - providing decent housing, food, medical care, and education throughout our entire society is also important to this process. The trick is to keep the system from getting bogged down in redtape and to keep taxes among the poor and middle class low and reasonable for the rich.

I like to view free software as a synthesis of many political and economic systems.

Anarchists, socialists, communists, capitalists, favor them because it happen to fit their views.

It is communistic because the source is voluntary shared. It is capitalistic because it promote competition, etc.

On the other hand, I also like to think of free software as a revolution. It is going to dismantle/reform an institution that came all the way from the middle age that is copyright and patent.

Some of the economists are already seeing them as even more beneficial to our economy. These economists view the idea of free software as a better economic policy.

In the end it doesn't matter if free software is more communistic than capitalistic because it is beneficial to society. It is economically beneficial, promote goodwill and trust among society, and more.

I must also point out our "so-called capitalist" friends are actually pseudo-capitalists. Free software promote competitions and this is what they opposed. So free software is actually more capitalistic. :P