[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“Sifting through the various reasons to produce and use Open
Source software, many good points are raised, but only a couple are
rarely mentioned.”
“One is the straight ‘Users X Value’ equation. The total value
of a piece of code is directly related to the number of users who
benefit. And the number of users benefiting is directly related to
the value of the Open Source code (quality, completeness,
innovation, and openness). The number of programmers is in turn
closely related to the number of (possibly commercial) users.
Due to the GPL, all innovation in Linux is guaranteed to be
available to everyone. Operating in this rapidly expanding pool of
freely usable code is a programmer’s dream.“
“This eventually brought about an explosion pushing Linux
towards being the managers and users dream environment as well. The
critical mass for Linux was reached in 1999, the chain reaction is
running fine, and the sky seems the limit.”