And the answer is "no". Small-c "communism" is far older than the first colonial settlements in North America, and has, in many cases, worked quite well.
The two keys to successful "communism" are 1) that the association be voluntary, and 2) some major philosophical idea which is the driving force for the communal organization. Both of these things currently exist within the "Linux community".
Successful "communist" organizations have been mostly religious (see the Shakers, Oneida community, and many others), but not all ("the Farm").
HOWEVER--in the long term, even these "communist" communities failed, typically because the central "major philosophical driving force" has lost appeal, in many cases as a result of success (accumulation of wealth).
IOW, Coral Snake is "getting his knickers in a knot" over something that simply doesn't matter in the long run. If he doesn't like the GPL, there "are" other sandboxes he can play in.
The five pound retail software box of paper, manuals, cardboard and ink that contains a 30 to 60 cent CD (mostly for printing the nice label) is a sign of a desparate effort to make $6 look like $60.
And why would the producer of a major software product be desparate to make $6 look like $60? Manufacturers of razor blades, cars and toasters don't routinely balloon their selling price by an order of magnitude -- they might fantasize doing such, but they are well aware that they'd go out of business if they tried.
The problem with software is that the costs of design and development, not of manufacturing and distribution, predominate.
Shared development software, which is what the GPL does a pretty good job of providing, dramatically reduces the costs of development, by sharing it with more people. Something like Linux has been a decade in developement and remains under more active change than ever. The software contained on a $12.99 CheapBytes Pink Tie Linux Full Set Vers. 9.0 (six CD's) is a huge effort, involving tens of thousands of programmers over decades.
Even the largest companies, eventually even Microsoft, and already IBM (migrating from MVS and such to Linux) cannot afford to keep proprietary software under the intense development that it takes to be world class in many categories.
In other words, communist GPL is succeeding for essentially capitalistic reasons. It produces the desired goods for dramatically less cost. This is because the cost of development is amortized over more users, and because, for software, to repeat myself, it's the cost of development that drives the price, not the cost of manufacturing and distribution (in this age of CD's and the internet).
You can get away with having a business model that is a little inefficient, because the costs of entry into a market by would-be competitors keeps them out.
But when your business model is an order of magnitude off, then you're a dinosaur, waiting for the comet to hit.
I'm not into music, but I suspect that the RIAA is also struggling to avoid learning this same lesson.