The influence of open-source programming philosophy (and the code it has

built) is pervasive in Web-based social networking sites such as eBay, Amazon,

LiveJournal, and MySpace, where comments and product reviews are an
essential feature of their commercial success and popularity. Perhaps most
significant for future economic development around the world, visionaries are
seeking ways to harness the “many-eyeballs effect” with networked
organizations that emulate the observed structure of open-source software
development teams.

Eric S. Raymond

LEARN MORE in these related Britannica articles:

Sun Microsystems, Inc.: Open-source software and purchase by Oracle

In 1999 Sun acquired the StarOffice software suite, a competitor of Microsoft’s Office
suite (primarily Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), and distributed it for free under the
name OpenOffice. The company strengthened its open-source commitment that
year by also selling…


 computer: Operating system design approaches

The best-known open system has been UNIX, originally developed by Bell
Laboratories and supplied freely to universities. In its Linux variant it is available for a
wide range of PCs, workstations, and, most recently, IBM mainframes.…

Internet: Electronic publishing

…the side of the “open source” publishers and demanded that government-financed
research be made available to taxpayers as soon as it has been published.…

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WRITTEN BY

Michael Aaron Dennis

Independent scholar. Author of A Change of State: The Political Cultures of Technical
Practice at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory, 1930–1945.

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