Open collaborative design/Free and open-source software

Perhaps ignoring the field of science, free and open-source software is where the concept of commons-based peer production originated. It is becoming increasingly prominent in the world of software development - GNU, Linux, Firefox, Apache, OpenOffice being some high profile examples.

Networks of people connected by the internet collaborate to evolve software and make it freely available to others. Not only is the product free to use, but so is the human-readable blueprint of the software, known as the source code. Anyone is free to customise or help improve open-source software and making these changes available to others encourages rapid development times, robustness and reduces duplication of effort.