People say capitalism is efficient, yet Twitter has around 5,OOO employees while Mastodon was built pretty much single handedly by Eugene Rochko. Today, Mastodon provides a strictly superior user experience with only a handful of contributors.
Majority of effort at Twitter is directed towards things like ads and tracking that are actively harmful from user perspective. Meanwhile, the core functionality of the platform that benefits the users can be implemented with a small fraction of the effort.
Seems to me that capitalism is actually far more inefficient than open source development in practice.
Or, alternately, even within a firm, if decisions about production were made democratically by workers who owned the means of production, they would be a lot more likely to meet the needs of that firm’s actual work than if these kinds of decisions are made by persons in management whose goal is just to have growth by shoving widgets out the door as fast as possible in an effort to artificially enhance balance sheets. It’s not necessary to plan an entire economy by eliminating 47 out of 50 bread brands and award exclusive contracts to one or two producers, etc. (tho I guess you could argue that this may be advisable anyway) and this argument is a lot easier to accept.