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From a recent survey FOSS has exceeded Microsoft's productive potential using a social, not an
industrial model. What the top industrialists could not achieve with proprietary software and
financial capital, FOSS succeed with community development and intellectual capital.
FOSS runs computers ranging from smart phones to Google scale super computers.
support you can choose from different support services instead in proprietary software support
market is a monopoly.
In FOSS the 0 sum game of proprietary software become a positive sum game where it is
possible for two people to both be winners in their own way. We have a better value if cooperate
instead of trying to destroy each other and global innovation potential.
If two developers implement and share two different features, they get double value having spent
time for only one implementation. There is more benefit to playing the game than there is sitting on
the side line and waiting for the game to be decided by other people (game theory).
3.4.2 Innovation
To understand how innovation works in FOSS model we can look at the work of Tim Berners Lee,
the inventor of the WWW. There have been many previous implementation of the WWW dating
back to 1945, but the work of Tim Berners Lee was the first one to actually use standards and
published as an open source model. The decision to make the WWW an open system was necessary
for it to be universal. You can't propose that something be a universal space and at the same time
keep control of it.
Patents stop innovation while sharing technologies and consider customers as innovators brings
progress. History shows how new opportunities opens from published inventions and expiration of
patents (see steam engine).
Sharing source code facilitates creativity and minimizes duplication of effort, programmers working
on complimentary projects can each leverage the results of the other, or combine resources into a
single project.
Every good work of software starts by a developer's personal need. The next best thing to having
good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Innovation comes giving the users actual and
authentic role in designing the product.
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4 Future of OSS
Now FOSS is pervasive, it runs computers ranging from smart phones to Google scale super
computers, you'll find it in public sector, government, health all over the world.
Gartner predict that at least 80% of all commercial software solutions will be based on OSS by
2011, and currently 50% of mission critical applications are based on OSS.
OSS will triumph simply because the closed source world cannot win a race with OS communities
that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem.
OS can develop and debug new software with the speed and creativity of science. The computer
industry needs the next generation of ideas that will come from Open Source development.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced that any researched who accepts its grant monies for
HIV/AIDS will have to agree to share their scientific findings, this is because two decades of
secrecy and competition among AIDS researchers have impeded efforts to come up with AIDS
vaccine.
A recent research showed that Encyclopedia Britannica has more errors than wikipedia.
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