Open Source is one of the engines of the world's economy and culture. Its next iteration will be bigger.

Once upon a time, the very concept of Open Source was absurd, and only its proponents ever thought it could be other than marginal. Important software could only be built and supported by sophisticated businesses, an expensive industrial component whose blueprints -- the source code -- was extremely valuable. It became clear, to no historian's surprise, that once knowledge is sufficiently distributed and tools become cheap enough, distributed development by heterogeneously (and heterogeneously motivated) people not only creates high-quality software at zero marginal cost; because it only takes a single motivated individual to leverage existing developments and move them forward regardless of its novelty or risk, it's inherently much more creative. Open Source developers can take risks others can't, and they begin from further ahead, on the shoulder of other, taller developers. When has true innovation began in any other way?