OPEN SOURCE INNOVATION OR COMMUNISM

From ‘Don’t listen to Bill Gates. The open-source movement isn’t communism.’
“This month, SAP’s Shai Agassi referred to open-source software as “intellectual property socialism.” In January, Bill Gates suggested that free-software developers are communists. A few years earlier, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called the open-source operating system Linux “a cancer.”

The above story makes some interesting points about open source and innovation. The article correctly points out that “The Web owes its existence to open source” with Apache driving 70% of web servers, for example. The networking protocol (DNS) that allow us to type in convenient web site names (Amazon.com) instead of an IP address made up of a series of numbers (207.171.163.90) is based on open source software. The internet was based on these types of open source software to become one of the biggest innovations of the past few decades. Without open source software, we might not have the internet. On other hand, we might have missed the dot-com bust, too … hmmm.