The Big Club

The mere existence of open source software makes commercial software better. Look at one of the most famous pieces of open source software: Firefox. There's a good chance that you're using it right now. But where did it come from? The five minute story, without going into a long, tedious history, is that it arose from the ashes of Netscape.

Netscape was first. It was the best, but then Microsoft decided that it wanted to control the internet and it wrote Internet Explorer and gave it as part of Windows. That's even kind of like "free," except now you had to pay for it even if you never used Windows for anything except solitaire (like the guy in the next cubicle.)

And Microsoft crushed Netscape. Ground them out of existence and spat on the grave.

But Netscape got them back. In its last dying gasp, it gave away all the source code to the world. Netscape begat Mozilla. Mozilla begat Firefox.

If not for that final act of spite, Microsoft would have been able to rest and stop sinking millions of dollars into their Internet Explorer. Now they have to always stay two steps ahead of what people could get for free somewhere else, or rather in this case two steps behind.

A similar story lies behind OpenOffice.org: Sun released the source code of Sun Office to the world because it wasn't able to compete with Microsoft's Windows/Office combination with its UNIX operating system, Solaris running Sun Office. This act forced (and is still forcing) Microsoft to expend another ton of money to stay ahead of what can be had for free.

Open source software is now serving two purposes: It serves as a big club to keep strong software companies from crushing weaker ones, and it forces commercial software to constantly improve to stay ahead of what can be had for free.

Below is a list of the major players.

Super Growth

Finally, there is the growth factor. Consider the growth of the sum of human knowledge. Each generation of thinkers build on the base of all the previous thinkers. As this accumulates, we see an exponential growth in the scope of human knowledge.

Open Source Software has the same potential: With each generation of software, all the previous versions of source code are always available to build on. Instead of two dozen companies working to basically re-invent the same thing in their back-room labs, all the inventing done on a base of open source software code is done such that there is (theoretically) no duplication of effort.

The model that forces secrecy actually holds us back from what we could truly make the computers do.

Like be a personal slave bot. We all need one of those, I'm sure.

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Building your own DVR and need to find out more about open source software? Check out more of our great articles!

• Get the scoop on MythTV
• Find out which DVD drive is right for you
• What's legal, and what isn't?

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