GPL versus OSS?

[Orethrius]

I want to hear people's input on this important - and still relevant - conversation.  The interesting bit to me is how, after all these years, it STILL seems to devolve into a shouting match regarding what, precisely. constitutes COMMUNIST (oooooo scary) interests in programming.  Here are a couple good links to kick off the conversation:

Open Source Communism
Benefits of Truly Free Licensing (Edit: Be sure to read the WHOLE archive of replies to this post, as some interesting points and counterpoints are brought up as well.)

Please don't spam these listings with any opinions you may have, as they are long since dead.  However, I think they make for a good kicking-off point for this thread.

[Calum]

i think a huge problem is that a huge number of people involved in the open source "argument" are americans with completely abstract, uninformed and totally incorrect views on what "communism" means.

same as their wrong (but much more understandable) misunderstanding of what "nazi" means. (it means National Socialist, which does have a specific meaning that is totally different to socialism or nationalism, but every time you see the word "nazi" used, the writer should have said "fascist" instead.)

[Aloone_Jonez]

If I wanted to be political about things I would say that open source is a democracy and closed source is a dictatorship - there's really nothing more to it.

[Calum]

open source is more like a form of anarchy, the only thing different being that each project usually has a maintainer or a heirarchy of maintainers, but the developers are usualyy self motivated and the structure beneath the maintainers is totally flat.