Origins and Future of Open Source Software, The

In a world where Microsoft increasingly threatens to dominate computing and the Internet, the strongest potential rival to its dominance is no longer its traditional commercial rivals but, surprisingly, a seemingly motley collection of free software tools and operating systems collectively dubbed "open source" software. Unlike most commercial software, the core code of such software can be easily studied by other programmers and improved upon--the only proviso being that such improvements must also be revealed publicly and distributed freely in a process that encourages continual innovation. From an operating system called Linux, named for a student from Finland who wrote its core code, to a web server named Apache, put together as literally "a patchy" set of updates to older software by a band of volunteer programmers, these open source programs are emerging not just as inexpensive but as more robust and dynamic alternatives to commercial software.