But it’s not leftist. Stallman certainly wanted it to be when he created the GPL, but it has worked incredibly well (and perhaps better) as a capitalist structure. It turns out, things like standards reduce costs overall, so you’ll get a better return on your capital by cooperating with others than keeping everything to yourself.

You can see this across the board. Most products are a derivative of other works, and being able to focus on your unique value proposition dramatically reduces costs and thus increases return on capital.

The whole notion of intellectual property is anti-capitalist, it’s government protectionism. Before IP laws were a thing, people built on each other’s innovations without restraint. Sometimes that lead to copycat works, and sometimes it lead to new works. IP law restricts derivative works, FOSS allows it, but puts limitations on them. I personally believe IP laws are one of the biggest hurdles to innovation and believe we should have much shorter patent and copyright duration to encourage more derivative works. FOSS is but one way to get around the current system.

because it’s a Capitalist entity

No, it’s because the leadership is stupid.

There are other privacy-respecting, “capitalist” companies that do just fine, they just have a different profit model. However, it just so happens that the masses seem to prefer paying with data and ad time over money for services. I don’t, so I avoid ad-supported services, mostly because I think that runs counter to the type of content I want to see. Sometimes that means I use FOSS, and sometimes that means I use privacy-respecting proprietary software.

When I used Reddit, I paid for an ad-free, proprietary mobile app. I’d do the same today if Reddit allowed fair competition with its app. But they have decided that ads, data collection, and mass appeal are the direction they want to go.

leftist structures are better than Capitalist structures in certain instances

I certainly believe that’s true, I just don’t think FOSS is inherently leftist. It’s a tool that works well both for capitalist and socialist interests, it has no economic or political bias.

Here are some areas where I think leftist structures are superior:

• education - I’m a fan of charter schools, and I think they should be run as co-ops owned by the teachers
• utilities - these are natural monopolies, so they should be run as a service to the community; that said, raw materials used by the utility could be for-profit (depending)
• banking - credit unions beat for profit banks in pretty much every area

I absolutely do have some leftist views, in fact I’m probably more left than both major US parties, on net. The left/right spectrum isn’t as interesting to me as the liberty/authoritarian spectrum. I want government to be less involved in my life, and I don’t really care if the solutions that make that happen come from the left or the right. But to me, FOSS isn’t either, it’s just a way for me to decide how I want my work to be used by others.

A grant of rights is not ownership. If you own something, you can do whatever you want with it. If you’re granted rights to something, you are limited by the terms of the agreement.

For example, with the GPL, you are not allowed to use any (substantial) portion of the work in a propriety product. However, if you’re the author of that portion, you can.

Common ownership means everyone has the same rights related to the software. And that’s just not true for FOSS, though it can effectively be true for certain projects, provided there are enough authors. Linux is effectively commonly owned because getting every author to reassign ownership is infeasible, whereas that’s exactly not the case with MongoDB, where you sign over all copyright interest, so they completely own the work.

FOSS doesn’t require shared ownership, only shared rights, so it’s not socialist.

just reread what you wrote