Impact of Open Source Software
We have all heard the term “Open Source” and most of us have used at least one open source program, but what is the real impact of open source software?
According to the European Union’s Enterprise and Industry report it is quite substantial ( see http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/studies/publications.htm the Economic Impact Final Report downloadable from there. I have also made it available: http://jaqui-greenlees.net/files/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf ( to save the EU the data transfer ) ) This report, while an in depth study, is focussed solely on the economic impact and ignores several key areas, while only lightly covering others.
The impact of Free / Libre Open Source Software on innovation and improvement in software s mentioned, but they don’t really cover some of the more significant events recently. Mostly because the report was finalized before the events occurred. One of the most significant was the release of Microsoft’s ® Internet Explorer 7 ®. The new features included in this product are a direct response to the success of the open source browser Mozilla Firefox. MS ® also included support for the open source gecko rendering engine that Firefox uses, for both it’s speed and it’s ability to handle Standards Compliant website scripts, which IE ® is known for failing miserably at.
The most important area that the EU report doesn’t really cover is the social impact that open source software has. Open Source Software has a huge social impact, for the simple reason of it is a community effort to develop open source software. The social and political borders that have limited “community” style interactions in the past were destroyed in the open source community. It doesn’t matter where someone comes from in the world, what their education is, what their political stand is, or religion.* What matters is who you are and what you can contribute. As Linus Torvalds has always said: “Show me the code”, his recent actions in submitting patches to the GNOME project to address some of the problems he commented on with GNOME are an example of this attitude. When he was asked for input on how to fix GNOME he just gave them “the code” to fix them, living up to the words he has used for years.
The open source community is comfortable with using collaboration tools online, and working with people from all over the world, the number of languages supported by open source software would not be as great as it is without the efforts of people who know these languages in translating the documentation, allowing for software coded right to display messages, menus and content in the end user’s language of choice.
Free / Libre Open Source Software is one half of the driving forces in the Global Community that has started ending the threat of another World War. Will anyone be willing to go to war with another country when the people in those countrys are regularly in collaboration online? Or in communication? A few short years ago it would have been unusual to find yourself in a discussion with someone on the other side of the planet about their local legal system, or the social scene in their town. Now, it’s common.
What? You don’t think Free / Libre Open Source Software had anything to do with that? Sorry, it did. F.L.O.S.S. is still the driving power of the internet, which is the other half of the equation in the Global Community.
Oh, no, Microsoft ® did not invent the internet, it was around in two different incarnations before Microsoft ® even started selling DOS. Microsoft ® did make it more popular when they integrated IE ® with Windows 95 ® making it far simpler for the average person to get online.
Instead of spending 90% of your time online dong the social web thing and blogging, use your preferred search engine and research the history of the internet and open source software, 60% of what Microsoft ® has done in the last 10 years is battle to keep up with open source software. A battle they are doomed to lose, not even Microsoft ® can afford to pay 20 million programmers to be at work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which is a rough estimate of the number of people actively volunteering their time and effort to an open source project at any given time.
* the religious wars over vi/emacs, gnome/kde, linux/*bsd, grub/lilo excepted 
August 9th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Interesting about open source and those pushing it. I have been looking at wireless routers with the view of putting one on my home computer. One of the companies pushing the fact that their equipment is usable with Linux has recently released what they call an open source router.
I looked at the website they set up for this router and noticed that the company had an article about installing this router - on Windows XP. They also had a link to the group set up to answer questions. I sent an email asking if they supported Linux and got back the response that they do not. They only support Windows and Mac OS. I also commented on the website for the router in question about why they did not cover installing their gear on Linux or some other open source OS. No response from them at all. Kinda gives a warm and fuzzy feeling as to how dedicated they are to their open source equipment, don’t it.