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The Open Source Revolution Is Just Beginning

by Open-Publishing - Monday 20 October 2003

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/...>

Open Source Everywhere

Software is just the beginning - open source is
doing for mass innovation what the assembly line
did for mass production. Get ready for the era when
collaboration replaces the corporation.

By Thomas Goetz

Cholera is one of those 19th-century ills that, like
consumption or gout, at first seems almost quaint, a
malady from an age when people suffered from maladies.
But in the developing world, the disease is still
widespread and can be gruesomely lethal. When cholera
strikes an unprepared community, people get violently
sick immediately. On day two, severe dehydration sets
in. By day seven, half of a village might be dead.

Since cholera kills by driving fluids from the body, the
treatment is to pump liquid back in, as fast as
possible. The one proven technology, an intravenous
saline drip, has a few drawbacks. An easy-to-use,
computer-regulated IV can cost $2,000 - far too
expensive to deploy against a large outbreak. Other
systems cost as little as 35 cents, but they’re too
complicated for unskilled caregivers. The result: People
die unnecessarily.

"It’s a health problem, but it’s also a design problem,"
says Timothy Prestero, a onetime Peace Corps volunteer
who cofounded a group called Design That Matters.
Leading a team of MIT engineering students, Prestero,
who has master’s degrees in mechanical and oceanographic
engineering, focused on the drip chamber and pinch valve
controlling the saline flow rate.

But the team needed more medical expertise. So Prestero
turned to ThinkCycle, a Web-based industrial-design
project that brings together engineers, designers,
academics, and professionals from a variety of
disciplines. Soon, some physicians and engineers were
pitching in - vetting designs and recommending new
paths. Within a few months, Prestero’s team had turned
the suggestions into an ingenious solution. Taking
inspiration from a tool called a rotameter used in
chemical engineering, the group crafted a new IV system
that’s intuitive to use, even for untrained workers.
Remarkably, it costs about $1.25 to manufacture, making
it ideal for mass deployment. Prestero is now in talks
with a medical devices company; the new IV could be in
the field a year from now.

ThinkCycle’s collaborative approach is modeled on a
method that for more than a decade has been closely
associated with software development: open source. It’s
called that because the collaboration is open to all and
the source code is freely shared. Open source harnesses
the distributive powers of the Internet, parcels the
work out to thousands, and uses their piecework to build
a better whole - putting informal networks of volunteer
coders in direct competition with big corporations. It
works like an ant colony, where the collective
intelligence of the network supersedes any single
contributor.

Open source, of course, is the magic behind Linux, the
operating system that is transforming the software
industry. Linux commands a growing share of the server
market worldwide and even has Microsoft CEO Steve
Ballmer warning of its "competitive challenge for us and
for our entire industry." And open source software
transcends Linux. Altogether, more than 65,000
collaborative software projects click along at
Sourceforge.net, a clearinghouse for the open source
community. The success of Linux alone has stunned the
business world.

| Sidebar: The Ideals of Open Source

| SHARE THE GOAL
| Open source projects succeed when a broad group of
| contributors recognize the same need and agree on how
| to meet it. Linux gave programmers a way to build a
| better, leaner operating system; Woochi gives wine
| lovers an encyclopedia as refined as they are.

| SHARE THE WORK
| Projects can be broken down into smaller tasks and
| distributed among armies of volunteers for execution.
| Tim O’Reilly, whose namesake company runs the Open
| Source Convention, calls this the ’architecture of
| participation,’ and it is the irresistible genius of
| open source, a tool that no corporate model can match
| for the sheer brainpower it yokes. But architecture
| demands structure: a review process that screens for
| the best contributions and avoids the ’fork’ - that
| horrible prospect that a project will split into a
| multitude of side projects.

| SHARE THE RESULT
| Open source etiquette mandates that the code be
| available for anyone to tweak and that improvements
| to the code be shared with all. Substitute creation
| for code and the same goes outside of software. Think
| of it as the triumph of participation by the many
| over ownership by the few. - T.G.

But software is just the beginning. Open source has
spread to other disciplines, from the hard sciences to
the liberal arts. Biologists have embraced open source
methods in genomics and informatics, building massive
databases to genetically sequence E. coli, yeast, and
other workhorses of lab research. NASA has adopted open
source principles as part of its Mars mission, calling
on volunteer "clickworkers" to identify millions of
craters and help draw a map of the Red Planet. There is
open source publishing: With Bruce Perens, who helped
define open source software in the ’90s, Prentice Hall
is publishing a series of computer books open to any
use, modification, or redistribution, with readers’
improvements considered for succeeding editions. There
are library efforts like Project Gutenberg, which has
already digitized more than 6,000 books, with hundreds
of volunteers typing in, page by page, classics from
Shakespeare to Stendhal; at the same time, a related
project, Distributed Proofreading, deploys legions of
copy editors to make sure the Gutenberg texts are
correct. There are open source projects in law and
religion. There’s even an open source cookbook.

In 2003, the method is proving to be as broadly
effective - and, yes, as revolutionary - a means of
production as the assembly line was a century ago.

| Sidebar: In the Beginning

| Hello everybody out there using minix-I’m doing a
| (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big
| and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones.
| This has been brewing since april, and is starting to
| get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people
| like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat

| Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll
| implement them :-)

| Linus

Thousands of coders, hackers, and developers answered
Linus Torvalds’ call - and helped him build a robust
system that continues to pick up steam. Yet what’s
amazing about Linux isn’t its success in the market. The
revolution is in the method, not the result. Open source
involves a broad body of collaborators, typically
volunteers, whose every contribution builds on those
before. Just as important, the product of this
collaboration is freely available to all comers. Of
course, there are plenty of things that are
collaborative and free but aren’t really open source
(Amazon.com’s book reviews, for instance). And many
projects aren’t widely collaborative, or are somewhat
proprietary, yet still in the spirit of open source
(such as the music available from Opsound, an online
record label). Not to mention that, as with any term
newly in vogue, open source is often invoked on tenuous
grounds. So think of it as a spectrum or - better still
– a rising diagonal line on a graph, where openness lies
on one axis and collaboration on the other. The higher
an effort registers both concepts, the more fully it can
be considered open source.

Of course, for all its novelty, open source isn’t new.
Dust off your Isaac Newton and you’ll recognize the same
ideals of sharing scientific methods and results in the
late 1600s (dig deeper and you can follow the vein all
the way back to Ptolemy, circa AD 150). Or roll up your
sleeves and see the same ethic in Amish barn raising, a
tradition that dates to the early 18th century. Or read
its roots, as many have, in the creation of the Oxford
English Dictionary, the 19th-century project where a
network of far-flung etymologists built the world’s
greatest dictionary by mail. Or trace its outline in the
Human Genome Project, the distributed gene-mapping
effort that began just a year before Torvalds planted
the seeds of his OS.

If the ideas behind it are so familiar and simple, why
has open source only now become such a powerful force?
Two reasons: the rise of the Internet and the excesses
of intellectual property. The Internet is open source’s
great enabler, the communications tool that makes
massive decentralized projects possible. Intellectual
property, on the other hand, is open source’s nemesis: a
legal regime that has become so stifling and restrictive
that thousands of free-thinking programmers, scientists,
designers, engineers, and scholars are desperate to find
new ways to create.

We are at a convergent moment, when a philosophy, a
strategy, and a technology have aligned to unleash great
innovation. Open source is powerful because it’s an
alternative to the status quo, another way to produce
things or solve problems. And in many cases, it’s a
better way. Better because current methods are not fast
enough, not ambitious enough, or don’t take advantage of
our collective creative potential.

Open source has flourished in software because
programming, for all the romance of guerrilla geeks and
hacker ethics, is a fairly precise discipline; you’re
only as good as your code. It’s relatively easy to run
an open source software project as a meritocracy, a
level playing field that encourages participation. But
those virtues aren’t exclusive to software. Coders, it
could be argued, got to open source first only because
they were closest to the tool that made it a feasible
means of production: the Internet.

The Internet excels at facilitating the exchange of
large chunks of information, fast. From distributed
computation projects such as SETI@home to file-swapping
systems like Grokster and Kazaa, many efforts have
exploited the Internet’s knack for networking. Open
source does those one better: It’s not only peer-to-peer
sharing - it’s P2P production. With open source, you’ve
got the first real industrial model that stems from the
technology itself, rather than simply incorporating it.

| Sidebar: Open Source We Love

"There’s a reason we love barn raising scenes in movies.
They make us feel great. We think, ’Wow! That would be
amazing!’" says Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Yale
studying the economic impact of open source. "But it
doesn’t have to be just a romanticized notion of how to
live. Now technology allows it. Technology can unleash
tremendous human creativity and tremendous productivity.
This is basically barn raising through a decentralized
communication network."

An Experiment in Open Source
At 37, Jimmy Wales has already established his legacy on
the Internet. Seven years ago, Wales, then a futures and
options trader on the Chicago Board of Trade, turned the
homepages of hobbyists into Bomis.com, an Internet
directory that lets visitors catalog related sites into
webrings. The result unified the disparate efforts of
millions of Internet users. It wasn’t open source, a
strategy still percolating in software. But it came
close.

Wales wanted something even closer. Long an admirer of
Torvalds and free software pioneer Richard Stallman, he
had a more deliberate experiment in mind: using
volunteer contributors to create an Internet
encyclopedia. As in software, perhaps open source could
could turn consumers into producers.

The first attempt came in 1999 with Nupedia, an
encyclopedia project with great ambitions and what
proved to be fatally onerous oversight. Aspiring
contributors had to apply for access; each article was
peer-reviewed and professionally edited. An entry had to
make it past seven or eight hurdles before being posted
onto the Nupedia site. "After two years and an amazing
amount of money," Wales shrugs, "we had 12 articles."

So in 2001, he tried again. Wales and his team
eliminated most of Nupedia’s barriers to participation
and invented Wikipedia using Wiki, the open source Web-
design software. Wikipedia isn’t much to look at. The
site resembles cutting-edge Web design circa 1994. But
like a lowly Pontiac Sunfire with a modified computer
chip, most of the action is under the hood. A grassroots
encyclopedia, Wikipedia has amassed more than 150,000
entries, using strict open source principles: Anybody
can write an article, and anybody else can improve it.
Revisions are posted on a Recent Changes page where
suggestions are pored over by a dedicated group of
Wikipedians. "There’s a simple way to tell if it’s any
good," says Wales. "Find an entry on something you know
something about. Odds are it’ll hold up pretty well -
you’ll probably even learn something new."

So what motivates Wikipedia contributors? Pretty much
the same things behind any open source project: a dash
of altruism, a dose of obsessive compulsiveness, and a
good chunk of egotism. It lets users have a hand not
just in shaping the debate, but in designing the
product. Some are genuinely motivated by the greater
good, or find it satisfying to apply their professional
knowledge to a broader audience, pro-bono style. And
some get to prove how smart they are.

Not to say mischief-makers don’t lurk out there.
Wikipedia has banned several ne’er-do-wells from the
site, and some areas have been locked down - the front
page, for instance, because, Wales says, "people kept
putting giant penis pictures on there." But in general,
the system works surprisingly well, and the traffic
bears that out. This summer, Wikipedia surpassed
Britannica.com in daily hits, according to Web traffic
monitor Alexa.com. Wikipedia’s popularity is all the
more extraordinary because, like Linux, it started as a
small-scale experiment. But the result challenged
Britannica, a 235-year-old institution.

There’s some satisfaction in the fact that the
technology behind Wikipedia is the same one that’s
baffled Britannica for years. The old-guard encyclopedia
has never figured out how to adapt to the digital era.
In 1998, Britannica stopped updating its print version
and focused on its CD-ROM, then last year revived the
print version. In 1999, it launched a free site online;
two years later, switched to a paid version. The
struggles aren’t unique, but they illustrate how a
proprietary model built on traditional notions of
intellectual property can be undone by irresistible
forces.

Now Wales is thinking big. He wants to square off with
Britannica not just online but in print and on CD-ROM.
Next year, he hopes to release Wikipedia 1.0, a peer-
reviewed and peer-edited compendium of 75,000 entries,
available to anyone, for commercial or noncommercial
purposes. He’s even considered pulling a Red Hat -
releasing an affordable paid version - before anybody
else does. "Things like textbooks, encyclopedias,
dictionaries, reference works - they lend themselves
very well to collaboration," says Wales. "In fact,
that’s how they’re done in the proprietary context, too.
But it costs Britannica money to pay people to write
articles; it costs to edit them. Those are all things we
do for free. So how can they compete? Our cost model is
just better than theirs."

Business gurus have a term for what drove Wikipedia:
innovation! It’s a flaccid buzzword these days, deflated
by a decade of leadership seminars and management
bibles. But when you look at what’s innovative about
open source, think Tom Paine, not Tom Peters.

Open source embodies an ethos as fruitful and resilient
as the closed capitalism Bill Gates represents: the
spirit of democratic solutions to daunting problems.
It’s the creed of Emerson, who preached independent
initiative and advocated a "creative economy." It’s the
philosophy of William James, whose pragmatism dictated
that "ideals ought to aim at the transformation of
reality." It’s the science of Frederick Taylor, who
proved that distributing work could exponentially boost
productivity and replace "suspicious watchfulness" with
"mutual confidence." It’s the logic of Adam Smith, whose
notion of "enlightened self-interest" among workers
neatly presages the primary motivation for many open
source collaborators.

Finding the roots of open source in Taylor and Smith is
especially significant because the approach isn’t, as
some insist, anticommercial or anticorporate. Rather, it
is a return to basic free-market principles. The open
source process fosters competition, creativity, and
enterprise. And just as Taylor and Smith provided the
intellectual grounding for the revolution in mass
production, open source offers the mechanism to mass
innovation.

While the assembly line accelerated the pace of
production, it also embedded workers more deeply into
the corporate manufacturing machine. Indeed, that was
the big innovation of the 20th-century factory: The
machines, rather than the workers, drove production.
With open source, the people are back in charge. Through
distributed collaboration, a multitude of workers can
tackle a problem, all at once. The speed is even greater
– but so is the freedom. It’s a cottage industry on
Internet time.

Just as the assembly line served the manufacturing
economy, open source serves a knowledge-based economy.
Facilitating intellectual collaboration is open source’s
great advantage, but it also makes the method a threat.
It’s a direct challenge to old-school R&D: a closed
system, where innovations are quickly patented and
tightly guarded. And it’s an explicit reaction to the
intellectual property industry, that machine of
proprietary creation and idea appropriation that grew up
during the past century and out of control in the past
30 years - now often impeding the same efforts it was
designed to protect.

Copyright and patents have an admirable purpose: They
give creators the right to exploit their creations for a
limited time. Then these innovations enter the public
domain. If it made sense that copyrights and patents
protected products, it makes sense that, in today’s
economy, they protect ideas and concepts, too.

But the balance and fair-mindedness that made the
American system hum like a well-tuned Briggs & Stratton
is now clogged up with opportunism. Copyright
protections that originally lasted 14 years now drag on
for nearly a century, leaving the public domain a barren
ground. Particularly since the mid-1990s, when the US
Patent and Trademark Office began recognizing business
methods, intellectual property has become more than just
guarding what you’ve made. Trademark, copyright, and
patents are now offensive weapons. The result often
impedes, rather than encourages, innovation.
Intellectual property has grown infuriating in its
excesses, such as Netflix’s recent patenting of
something as simple as a subscription model for DVD
rentals.

Perversely, this is just how the law wants it. The
courts and the patent and trademark offices exist to
protect property, be it physical or intellectual - slap
on "All Rights Reserved" and reap the rewards. But it’s
annoyingly difficult to share something - to open
intellectual property to a wide audience. The
conventional legal system simply isn’t built to handle
"Some Rights Reserved."

Open source flips this paradigm around. Now there are
dozens of licenses, from Stallman’s General Public
License to Creative Commons’ ShareAlike agreement, that
let open products exist in a proprietary world. Under
these licenses, to use political scientist Steven
Weber’s terms, property is something to be distributed
rather than protected. The owners are more guardians
than guards.

The first and most likely places for open source to
flourish are at the extremes of IP. The method can craft
better, more open versions of bad business models and
inefficient markets. But the imitative projects, the
ones that replicate proprietary products using better
means, are just the gimmes. In the long term, open
source will apply outside IP-dominated industries. Weber
suggests corporate R&D as a natural starting point; the
oil industry, for instance, could enlist outside
chemists to collaborate on better oil refining
techniques.

As technology reduces the costs of replication and
distribution to nearly nothing, the open source approach
could catalyze stagnant sectors of the economy - or,
better yet, create new economic sectors. "Open source
can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that
people want it to fill," says Mitch Kapor, who founded
Lotus in 1982, cofounded the Electronic Frontier
Foundation in 1990, and now heads the Open Source
Applications Foundation. (See Mitch Kapor Reinvents Your
Inbox.) "In an economy where more and more value is in
information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits
can be copied essentially for free - any time you have
that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing
models of intellectual property laws for protection are
going to do less and less well. If information wants to
be free, then that’s true everywhere, not just in
information technology."

Open Source as a Weapon

A decade ago, Michael Eisen slogged through swamps in
Costa Rica studying the mating behavior of frogs. That’s
what biologists did, he figured - and if he had to fight
off a few leeches along the way, so be it. Now he’s all
about coding, crafting blocks of genetic data and
churning them through his computer. "It’s a great time
to be a biologist," says Eisen, a computational
scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
"Origin of Species is the best thing ever written in
biology. But you just wish Darwin knew about genomics."

Yet if biology is in a renaissance, there are still
relics of a medieval age. Most aggravating to Eisen is
the state of scientific publishing. It affronts him. And
he wants to destroy it.

His weapon is open source. Unlike Wikipedia’s Jimmy
Wales, who didn’t set out to take down Britannica, Eisen
has the publishing community squarely in his sights.
Open source, says Eisen, who dabbles in Perl
programming, can give rise to a new distribution model
for scientific research.

"The guiding principle of science has been that freely
available material is more useful; it’s more likely to
generate better science," Eisen says. But freely
available is not the same as free of charge. Science
journals, with their historically narrow readerships,
often charge thousands for a subscription. One of the
biggest disseminators is Elsevier, the science
publishing unit of an Anglo-Dutch media conglomerate,
which distributes some 1,700 academic journals, from
Advances in Enzyme Regulation to Veterinary
Parasitology.

"The whole premise for that model just evaporated with
the Internet," Eisen continues. "Technology now makes
openness possible; it’s maximum openness. The rules of
the game have changed, but the system has failed to
respond." So Eisen and two colleagues - Stanford
biochemist Pat Brown and Harold E. Varmus, a Nobel
laureate in medicine and president of the Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York - have devised
an alternative: the Public Library of Science. To Eisen,
PLOS is "the optimal system" for publishing scientific
research: Where the old model limited access to maximize
subscription fees, this library is all about open access
– meaning any user can read, download, copy, distribute,
print, search, or link to an article.

Instead of charging universities thousands to subscribe
to PLOS Biology or PLOS Medicine, as the library’s two
peer-reviewed journals will be called, PLOS instead will
charge contributing authors a $1,500 fee to cover costs.
(Harvard and other universities typically pay on behalf
of their faculties, and the library will waive the fee
in special cases.) In addition to hiring editorial
staffs, PLOS will distribute the work among a pool of
fellow academics. In time, the library will become a
storehouse of publicly available scientific research, a
resource that, like Linux, will only improve with time.
And whereas the old model traditionally had scientists
signing away their copyright to the journal, the library
will use a license that leaves copyright with the author
but allows for unlimited use by third parties, provided
credit is given to the author.

"The openness will make the data more useful," says
Eisen, pointing to the annual $57 billion in taxpayer-
funded scientific and medical research that isn’t
available to the public. And then there’s the irony that
academic institutions get charged for work they did in
the first place. "How does it make sense for the
universities to give away the copyright to their
research and then pay to get access to it again?"

The library follows in the steps of efforts such as
BioMed Central, a London-based open-access publisher of
online scientific journals. Though BioMed is a valuable
repository of all sorts of research - everything from
proteomics to psychiatry - it has yet to make a
significant dent in the major journals’ hold on big
research. That’s the obstacle PLOS faces, too:
convincing scientists that the new publication will have
authority. Publishing in Science or Nature means your
paper matters, and it provides a yardstick for tenure
and promotion decisions. PLOS has already earned
credibility by hiring the former editor in chief of Cell
and lining up contributors from Harvard, Princeton,
Yale, and the National Institutes of Health for the
first issues of PLOS Biology, set to debut October 13.
The team hopes such star power will help put any issues
of credibility to rest.

And to those who label PLOS something only a league of
anticommercial academics could dream up, Eisen has a
swift retort. "It’s the ultimate free market - the free
market of ideas," he says. "We don’t prohibit commercial
use, we encourage it. If you want to gather our articles
about a particular topic and sell it as a book, great,
go ahead. As far as we’re concerned, that’s a good way
of getting information out there. The problem with
scientific publishing right now is that it’s a monopoly.
This is an attack on a specific business model that is
not serving science well."

Building a Hybrid

At any given time, odds are Monsanto is in court over
intellectual property. The agriculture and biotech giant
is suing rival companies for infringing on technology.
It’s suing researchers for unlicensed use. And it’s
suing farmers for stealing seeds - filing 75 or so
lawsuits in the past five years alone, most notably
against Percy Schmeiser, a Canadian cause celebre
accused of using Monsanto grain without a license; his
case goes before the Canadian Supreme Court in January.
This constant litigation is a necessary cost of doing
business; patents, after all, must be protected, or
their value can be lost. But it also reflects a
demanding way of doing business, one that’s expensive,
time-consuming, and - as the Schmeiser case attests -
not always good for PR.

For a different approach, consider Cambia, the Center
for the Application of Molecular Biology to
International Agriculture, a biotech nonprofit based in
Australia. Founded in 1994 by Richard Jefferson, a
mandolinist turned geneticist from Santa Cruz,
California, Cambia has emerged as a force in agriculture
technology over the past decade. The group pioneered
research into transgenomics, where plants are tweaked
using their own genetic stock rather than foreign genes.
But Jefferson finds Cambia increasingly hamstrung by the
biotech industry’s reliance on patents, cross-license
agreements, and trade secrets. "So much of what we want
to do is all tied up in somebody’s intellectual
property," he says. "It’s a complete sclerotic mess,
where nobody has any freedom of movement. Everything
that open source has been fighting in software is
exactly where we find ourselves now with biotechnology."

So Jefferson tapped open source methods to skirt the
restrictive licenses of companies like Monsanto. On a
broad scale, Cambia built an exhaustive collaborative
database, open to all, of 300,000 patents covering
agricultural technologies - an essential resource for
researchers navigating through proprietary waters. And
as a more precise effort, Cambia is developing a gene-
transfer technology that will, Jefferson hopes, work
better than the proprietary methods currently available.
The group is following Torvalds’ model, incubating the
core technique before turning it over to a network of
users - both nonprofit and corporate - with a liberal
licensing arrangement. "Anybody can tweak it, learn from
it, twiddle with it," Jefferson says. "We want to invent
a better way but bind everybody to share the
improvements. Some might call them work-arounds; we call
them work-beyonds."

Corporations have been part of the problem for
Jefferson, but they’re also part of the solution. Open
source offers biotech companies a cheaper way to do
research. "The corporations have been locked in a zero-
sum game," Jefferson says. "It costs them a fortune to
buy and lock up a product or a technology. And if they
don’t, a competitor will get it and they’ll have no
access to it. So it’s a real change in the status quo
we’re proposing. We’re reducing the obstacles for
everybody so big companies won’t view this as
antithetical to their own progress."

Jefferson is onto something. Open source is often framed
as an attack on the corporate world at large. But in
fact, the open source approach can be a boon for
companies. Licensing from a trusted collaborative
project saves money and leaves the technology open to
further development. By showing corporations that a
closed, defensive approach to intellectual property can
be less efficient than liberal licensing, Cambia and a
few other open source efforts are leading the way to the
mainstream.

In this light, where corporations are part of the model,
open source suddenly becomes something less marginal and
more ingenious. It forces industry to reckon with
openness rather than hide behind intellectual property.
In driving down the cost of software or encyclopedias or
biotechnology, open source is unleashing billions in
capital otherwise put to woefully inefficient ends. Just
because it’s not about making money first doesn’t mean
it won’t make money second (just ask the folks who
bought their mansions with Red Hat shares).

"Open source can build around the blockages of the
industrial producers of the 20th century," says Yale’s
Benkler. "It can provide a potential source of knowledge
materials from which we can build the culture and
economy of the 21st century."

If that sounds melodramatic, consider how far things
have come in the past decade. Torvalds’ hobbyists have
become an army. Britannica’s woes are Wikipedia’s gains.
In genetics and biotech, open source promises a sure
path to breakthroughs. These early efforts are mere
trial runs for what open source might do out in the
world at large. The real test, the real potential, lies
not in the margins. It lies in making something new, in
finding a better way. Open source isn’t just about
better software. It’s about better everything.

To rebel is right, to disobey is a duty, to act is necessary !

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