No lo niego, el título de este post es totalmente provocador. Muchos defensores del open source serán a su vez los primeros en denostar el "neoliberalismo" (término que se suele utilizar peyorativamente para identificar al liberalismo económico o, al menos, a una parte de él). Pero Agroblogger (poco sospechoso de tendencias neoliberales) da buenas razones al defender que Adam Smith, el patrón de la economía liberal, fue el primer defensor del código abierto:
The first advocate of Open Source was none other than the patron saint of neoliberal economics: Adam Smith. Although Smith's classic The Wealth of Nations has become the de-facto Bible of the neoliberal agenda, invoking Smith to justify cut-throat capitalism is nothing more than a distortion of his true philosophical beliefs.
According to Smith, the "invisible hand" of the free market, set into motion by rational self-interest, would result in a price that provides a fair return to land, labor, and capital invested, and produce a satisfactory outcome for buyers and sellers. His idealized model envisioned local economies and local markets as the mechanism for achieving an optimal allocation of resources.
