You must compensate each and every person who has been harmed by your Magic System. And the man who had the Magic System wailed and gnashed but was ordered to hand over all his money to the damaged people. OSS is often mistaken for 'shareware' or 'freeware' but there are significant differences between these licensing models and the process around each product. The basic idea behind open source is very simple. When programmers on the Internet can read, redistribute, and modify the source for a piece of software, it evolves.
People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs.
And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing. But the most interesting feature of the Open Source Software development process, for us Year 2000 litigators, is that the rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see source code and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits. The reasons why Open Source Software works and produces reliable code were analysed initially by Eric Raymond in ' The Cathedral and the Bazaar '. In 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' Raymond anatomised a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some of his surprising theories about software engineering which had been suggested by the history of the development of the Linux operating system. The developers are in control of their projects and are keen to make them work.