“Early in the history of the computer, the availability of
source code was taken for granted. Then from the late 1970s to the
present, a multibillion-dollar industry was created from selling
software which had no source code available. But open source is
back, driven largely by the software and services that make up the
Internet–and the speed of collaboration and efficiency of the
development model that the global network enables.“Open source advocates say that when developers can read,
redistribute and modify the source code for a piece of software,
the software improves and evolves at a speed that, if one is used
to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems
astonishing…”