Labor day: and it's been a busy weekend, much of it spent away from computers. There were two beautiful hikes, one near Loch Lomond in Santa Cruz County and the other in Portola Valley.

Both gave me the opportunity to think as I walked under redwoods, oak and bay laurel.  Open Source is really an amazing concept:  Linux. Apache, thousands of applications just appear, and keep getting better. Linux is already approaching Windows, if not surpassing it in some areas in utility.

And yet, there's no giant corporation at the root, no huge profit motive driving its many coders.  True, many big corprations are jumping on board, and are making money providing service and support, but it's not like Sun, Microsoft et al. in the past.

Open Source just sort of happened: it self-organized out of the potential that awaited a networked world.  And its clear to me that the benfits to the world will be very large. Computing costs will go down, computers will become accessible to wider groups of people, and those people will make contributions, both to Open Source and the wider global society.

It's as if Open Source is a model that has much wider applicability than just the creation of good software that happens to be free.  Stay tuned...

Comments 8:19:26 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures