"This is the act of doing things for the common good, for
nothing - either from altruistic motives or because you expect to
get compensated by using the product of someone else's free
endeavours. Until recently, this kind of activity - known
generically as "open source" - has been confined to software
through such brilliant communal projects as Wikipedia, the Firefox
browser (which now has 21.5% of the global market) or the Linux
operating system. Interestingly, such products don't appear in the
figures for gross domestic product (GDP) - at least, not until they
are used in something that can be bought, such as a low-cost Linux
computer. It is unrecorded wealth and if the movement grows we will
have to look afresh at how we measure the wealth of nations."
