[Excerpt from The World Is Flat, Chapter 2, "The Ten Forces That Flattened the World", p. 82 ff.]

The word "open-source" comes from the notion that companies or ad hoc groups would make available online the source code -- the underlying programming instructions that make a piece of software work -- and then let anyone who has something to contribute improve it and let millions of others just download it for their own use for free. While commercial software is copyrighted and sold, and companies guard the source code as they would their crown jewels so they can charge money to anyone who wants to use it and thereby generate income to develop new versions, open-source software is shared, constantly improved by its users, and made available for free to anyone. In return, every user who comes up with an improvement -- a patch that makes this software sing or dance better -- is encouraged to make that patch available to every other user for free...

... IBM was trying to sell its own proprietary Web server, called GO, but it gained only a tiny sliver of the market. Apache proved to be both a better technology and free. So IBM eventually decided that if it could not beat Apache, it should join Apache. You have to stop here and imagine this. The world's biggest computer company decided that its engineers could not best the work of ad hoc open-source collection of geeks, so they threw out their own technology and decided to go with the geeks!...

... IBM saw the value in having a standard vanilla Web server architecture -- which allowed heterogeneous computer systems and devices to talk to each other, displaying e-mail and Web pages in a standard format -- that was constantly being improved for free by an open-source community. The Apache collaborators did not set out to make free software. They set out to solve a common problem -- Web serving -- and found that collaborating for free in this open-source manner was the best way to assemble the best brains for the job they needed done...

Today Apache is one of the most successful open-source tools, powering about two-thirds of the Web sites in the world. And because Apache can be downloaded for free anywhere in the world, people from Russia to South Africa to Vietnam use it to create Web sites....

At the time, selling a product built on top of an open-source program was a risky move on IBM's part. To its credit IBM was confident in its ability to keep producing differentiated software applications on top of the Apache vanilla. This model has since been widely adopted, after everyone saw how it propelled IBM's Web server business to commercial leadership in that category of software, generating huge amounts of revenue.

As I repeat often in this book: There is no future in vanilla for most companies in a flat world. A lot of vanilla making in software and other areas is going to shift to open-source communities

The striking thing about the intellectual commons form of open-sourcing is how quickly it has morphed into other spheres and spawned other self-organizing collaborative communities, which are flattening hierarchies in their areas. I see this most vividly in the news profession, where bloggers, one-person online commentators, who often link to one another depending on their ideology, have created a kind of open-source newsroom..."We've got an army of citizen journalists out there."...