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. The open-source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits. Mature open-source code is as bulletproof as software ever gets. This is a radical idea to many businesspeople. He describes himself as a wandering anthropologist and troublemaking philosopher who happened to be in the right place at the right time, and has been wondering whether he should regret it ever since.