Communism for intellectual property

What we have experienced in the last two decades with the arrival of affordable computers to the home setting and the availability of mass information via the internet is the birth of the information age, and with its conception, the popular transgression of information and media.

Given the ease of sharing digital information and media at an insignificant cost, we have seen a selection and general availability of resources unprecedented since the start of the public library.

In addition to websites, P2P (Peer to Peer) technologies have arisen to facilitate economical file distribution, which, in application, may be used to share lawful content (but is more often used to share copyrighted content). Through these, people have experienced a taste of a form of communal distribution, in which each individual participant puts forth files and bandwidth in exchange for the gargantuan collection of files and the aggregated bandwidth of others.. which, for me, for one reason or another, evokes an image of limited communism for intellectual property.

I think of it as the contribution of work in order to obtain the larger body of work that is being contributed by everyone else, which occurs at a much more prolific rate than with the sharing of private ideas via capitalism. Individuals that contribute in this system can, essentially, have access to everything that is available, rather than being selective with one's salary in the purchasing of informational goods.

Out of this (and oftentimes before this) came numerous projects with an imperative to pursue the development of typical forms of "intellectual content" without the incentive of profit. These projects involve the altruistic dedication of labor for the benefit of others. It would be like if someone could design a chair (for lack of a better example) and then distribute it at virtually no cost; it's an action of altruism that is based on its medium for distribution. But, beyond that, there has been the advent of "open" projects. In these, no form of property (in the normative sense) is claimed, allowing individuals to modify and contribute to the products as they see fit and then disclose those modifications for the public where the product, fostered by the community, begins to flower and take newer, better forms.

Some examples might be:
1. Open-source web browser: Firefox
2. Open encyclopedia: Wikipedia
3. Open-source office software: OpenOffice.org
4. Open-source operating systems: FreeBSD and Linux
5. Directory of open-source software: SourceForge
6. Digital library for books with expired copyrights: Project Gutenberg
7. Open-source audio encoding technology: Ogg Vorbis

Furthermore, open software projects have become competitive with commercial projects. Firefox has significantly reduced Microsoft Internet Explorer's market share (and in my opinion is a far superior product), and OpenOffice.org and Linux are making trails in developing countries and business as a free alternative to Microsoft Office and commercial operating systems.

The "open" paradigm is altruistic and for everyone's benefit, which is at least partially antithetic of a commercial paradigm.