Internet and Open Source
Internet has become omnipresent. It affects all dimensions of our social life. It has facilitated many activities and has made possible some completely new. While the web currently is highly commercialized and the services often privatized, the code layer of most of the services around Internet is still free. This is because Internet as a network has been built on open source basis. Even the services that are protected by copyright do normally use programs with open source code. Not all in the information technology works this way. Many companies, Microsoft and Apple to name two big ones, have kept their source code private. In fact, this habit of companies to keep the source code private has been motivating the developing of what is perhaps the most remarkable open source invention: the Unix operating system [Lessig]. The fact that, despite of the government supported competition by the private source code software, creators of which are investing huge amounts of money to the development and marketing of their products, most of the software, and the best working software, have been developed by open source communities, demonstrates the efficiency and the innovativeness of the open source society.
The privatizing of the source codes, like of any other things, is defended by claim that when the society that develops the code is privileged to use it, they will get whole profit of creating the code and thus they are able to invest more in creating it. It is not the profit of the creator of the code, that is aimed, but the creativity itself: the claim is, that for innovativeness it is good, if the codes, like everything else, are kept private. However, during the history of the informational technology and especially that of the Internet, the innovations have not come from the side of those who have copyright protected their codes, but from that of the open source community. The open source software simply works better and develops faster than its protected counterpart; the community of the contributors to the open source brings more innovations, than that of closed code, and they are often able to profit of their communal inventions.
There are two basic reasons why the society as a whole should have the access to the source code. Firstly, the intellectual inventions are never just pulled out of thin air. There's always a social history to each step in development. It is therefore at least to some degree unjust that someone gets a privilege to some intellectual invention, when there have always been other contributors to the invention, the people who have freely shared their knowledge to the one who has made the invention he wants to have a privilege to. Secondly, since the inventions emerge in a society rich in connections, a society that keeps the source code open also is likely to be more innovative than one where everybody only develops the code of their own. The open source practices meet the P2P-networking in peer production: the developers of an open source product form immediately a self-organizing, non-hierarchical society. [Lessig]