Free and open-source software/What is so good about it?

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Revision as of 03:22, 15 January 2007 by CharlesC (Talk | contribs) (Free and open-source software/Why is it so good? moved to Free and open-source software/What is so good about it?)

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The fact that thousands of other people are able to make use of the software having put in no effort themselves and haven't paid any money simply isn't an issue - after all it effectively costs nothing to replicate the software and the open-source developers are only too happy that it is proving useful to a wider audience. It is truly maximizing it's utility.

Commercial software that has restrictions on what you can do with it, such as not giving a copy to your friend, imposes an artificial scarcity on it in order that they can charge money for it. In the world of bits and the internet this commercial model doesn't make much sense and starts to break down.

Because of the mutual benefits, open source projects encourage collaboration on an almost unheard of scale, as well as promoting rapid evolution and stability of the applications being developed (one might normally consider the last two properties as being mutually exclusive). There are now high quality open source projects filling every major category of software application, including entire operating systems for your computer.

What goes around comes around

If the software is useful to many people then there is a wide audience who can get involved. People are motivated to contribute because the result of their work benefits many people. Someone putting in effort on an open-source software project knows there are similar minded people putting in effort on other software projects that will be useful to them also. So what goes around comes around.