It’s not hard to come up with a dozen different reasons why the rise of open source development has been a watershed event in both the software and hardware industries. All of us can build new web applications faster with our feet firmly planted on the shoulders of jQuery, Bootstrap, and Apache. Languages like Ruby, PHP, and Python power the Internet, and operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD provide the foundation for thousands of companies and services.
But open source isn’t just about the free tools we have access to, it’s also about the community of developers that will help support crazy new ideas and give them a chance to thrive, grow, and change the world; ideas that would never see the light of day in a closed source world.