Open Source Software has a hugely important factor that we don't talk about enough, IMHO: it promotes standards that are actually accepted.
Think about it. A new image compression standard comes out. What are the chances that it becomes widely accepted and used if there isn't any Open Source (or at least free) tooling to compress and decompress it? And just "free" might not be enough, because lots of folks need to incorporate it into their own software (image viewers, browsers, chat clients etc.), and they wouldn't take that risk if they could link it, but maybe not apply a security fix if the vendor didn't react quickly enough.
Image formats are a relatively benign example, but deeper in the stack, non-interoperability becomes much more of an issue. How many programming languages without Open Source implementations became really successful? How about OS APIs? Do you think we would have somewhat compatible libc and syscall landscapes without Open Source BSD distributions and Linux?
And then there's version control, implementation of communication standards (bluetooth, USB, but also TCP/IP stacks).... the more I think about it, the more horrifyingly fractured the software world would look without OSS as a unifying force.
Think about it. A new image compression standard comes out. What are the chances that it becomes widely accepted and used if there isn't any Open Source (or at least free) tooling to compress and decompress it? And just "free" might not be enough, because lots of folks need to incorporate it into their own software (image viewers, browsers, chat clients etc.), and they wouldn't take that risk if they could link it, but maybe not apply a security fix if the vendor didn't react quickly enough.
Image formats are a relatively benign example, but deeper in the stack, non-interoperability becomes much more of an issue. How many programming languages without Open Source implementations became really successful? How about OS APIs? Do you think we would have somewhat compatible libc and syscall landscapes without Open Source BSD distributions and Linux?
And then there's version control, implementation of communication standards (bluetooth, USB, but also TCP/IP stacks).... the more I think about it, the more horrifyingly fractured the software world would look without OSS as a unifying force.