First, one of the problems with the comparison you draw is that free riders are only a problem if they consume FINITE resources. In the case of a real-world community where, for instance, there is a finite amount of food available, free riders are obviously a huge burden on the community.

In a digital community, however, the ratio and nature of resources is dramatically different. Digital resources are so cheap that free riders may actually not be a problem.

An open source software development community is a good example of this. Aside from relatively insignificant bandwidth concerns and a bit of ‘newbie’ clutter on the message boards, there’s no real reason for an open source group not to embrace so-called free riders. Rather than consuming community resources, they actually contribute to the community in two important ways:

1. Testing. Whether they mean to or not, open source “free riders” contribute valuable information to the software they use simply by using it. Whether bugs are reported automatically or manually, the experiences of the user are essential to betterment of the product.

2. Network effects. The more people that use an open source product, the more potential developers are in the community. So it doesn’t particularly matter if only 1% of users contribute, because an increase of 100 users still gives the community 1 new developer. The 99 non-developers don’t take away resources, but the 1 new developer contributes new resources. And more users beget more users.

I think, in a general sense, your suggestion that digital communities share something with communism is certainly accurate, but they operate in such a dramatically different system of resources and constraints that you can’t conclude that their fates will play out in the same way.

Anyway, like I said, I enjoyed your analysis, so you’re definitely going into my RSS reader…