Engines, steering wheels, and open source

The vice president of technology at a leading software vendor recently told me that he spends a lot of time wondering how open source projects can possibly work. “You take out the internal combustion engine, yet somehow the car still runs,†he said. But my take was that there is a powerful engine purring under the hood of open source and creative programming is addictive. Part of the rush comes from the endorphins released when the mind enters a state of flow. And part comes from the peer acclaim.