One of the most ignorant arguments against socialism is expressed in the often-used statement, “nobody has ever washed a rental car.” It is foolish because rental cars, which are privately owned and maintained, are products of capitalist society. Therefore, not to respect them falls back to capitalism. Going beyond buzzwords and ignorant tautologies, one can find socialism thriving in many unexpected places.

One such case is the Open Source Software movement, which is composed of thousands of programmers and users from all over the world. Their general aim is synonymous with the Free Software Foundation’s mission to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify and redistribute computer software and to defend the rights of Free Software users. All OSS software is essentially communal, rather than privately owned.

Some of the more famous examples include the Mozilla Web browser, the Apache Web server, the Linux kernel and my personal favorite, the OpenBSD operating system. In the OSS development model, the means of production are controlled by workers because of the de-commercialization and interconnectedness inherent in the software’s production. Wage for labor, an essential characteristic in capitalist society, is a necessary aspect of OSS. The resulting product is thus wholly socialist — produced for people and not personal profit.

OSS dominates the Internet backbone market. Domain Name System, the service which maps names such as www.google.com to a specific server and physical location, is one example. Over 70 percent of all DNS servers on the Internet use one form of open source DNS software or another. More than two-thirds of all webservers run open source webserver software, and the most widely used OSS mail server software, Sendmail, beats the top commercial competitor by more than a factor of two.

There are two main reasons for this success. First, the software is considerably more reliable than its commercial counterpart. A quick look at Netcraft’s list of longest uptimes shows that 47 of the top 50 most stable webservers run open source webserver software. OSS systems are more stable because of their democratic, open source production method, which leads to higher quality code. Second, OSS is generally more secure. Security issues are often fixed within an hour after their discovery due to the altruism of the OSS community — motivated by love for the community and not selfish profit.

By contrast, commercial vendors have been known to leave vulnerabilities unfixed for months and even years. Jim Allchin, a vice president in Microsoft’s Windows division, once said that Microsoft’s code is so flawed that our national security would be threatened if even portions of Windows code were made public. Hackers could study the code to discover unfixed vulnerabilities in Windows.

OSS code is by definition open to the public, and the long history of bug fixing has left the software solid compared to commercial software. Preventable security issues in commercial software packages cost consumers billions upon billions of dollars every year. Due to Microsoft’s heavy-handed business practices, capitalism has failed to provide an alternative. Even Apple has adopted an OSS core.

Capitalists must concede the superiority of OSS. Denying it would be to reject their own faith in the market.

It is true that commercial software dominates the end-user desktop operating system market. The reason for this is simply that the open source community as a whole is much less focused on that aspect, but it will happen in good time. This lack of dominance in one particular market does nothing to take away from the irrefutable reality of socialism’s immense strength in the software industry. This strength is based on principles that work in any environment — not just the production of software.

What we’re talking about is human capital as opposed to financial capital. The OSS movement has undeniably proven people are fully capable of working together and coordinating large, complex projects to produce goods without the self-interest of wage for labor, upon which capitalism is so helplessly dependent. It has therefore proven that if given the chance, people can be trusted with the responsibility to produce society’s goods and services without the economic model of capitalism. The OSS movement has proven the viability and in its case superiority of socialism.