Open Source: fast, cheap, and out of control

Kelly McNeill writes “The open source movement has given rise to a new development paradigm. We might call it — to steal the title of a good documentary — “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control.” Developers are writing code to scratch a personal itch or solve a specific problem. For a commercial software house, that approach would be suicide because the market for such software is minuscule. But in a networked world, even the most obscure and special-purpose software will gain an audience, even if just a few people.”