Introduction Imagine hundreds of people working on the same program at the same time.
Imagine if those people do not know each other and, in fact, do not individually have overall knowledge of the program but merely want to adapt it in order to solve their own particular problems. Imagine each of them being able to contribute their fixes and enhancements to the program while sharing the same code base. This is the vision of the Open Source movement, responsible for such popular software as the Apache web server and the emacs text editor.