Copyrights may not be capitalist, but open source is socialism, since everybody has equal access, and people contribute according to their ability (and desire, which I guess is what distinguishes it from state socialism). And it somehow works. This is what opened my eyes to the fact that self-interest isn't always necessary to produce something useful.
It also shows you the flaws in socialism. Since there is no monetary gain, most people work on open source on their free time and important bug fixes and features are many times never implemented. There are thousands of projects like this and only a handful of truly successful open source projects. This is opposed to the thousands of successful commercial/proprietary ones.
Almost all large, successful open source projects are sponsored by a company with money and they are benefiting financially from the work involved (It might be helping their services or support).
Is this bad for software? Not necessarily, it just results in bug-ridden and outdated code. However, when the same principals are applied to an economy, the results are much worse.
Linux and GNU started as fun projects though, right? Company support came later.
And in a sense, maybe one could say that each company is in a sort of socialism vis a vis each other? The Linux foundation is made up of multiple companies. Yes it is for monetary gain, but in the extreme case of total socialism, everybody works toward personal gain, and that's all that monetary gain represents in the end anyway.
You're right it's clearly not total anarchy, but the anarchist aspect works out way better than I would have expected before I was exposed to it. I think it's got aspects of both personal interest and cooperation. I think both have their place in life.
