Hence it empowers each user a little bit and the developer tremendously. The same can be said of the Windows operating system. Open source software reduces this imbalance. Checked from a wide ranges of angles, the software becomes not only more stable, but also more clean or neutral. Paradoxically, this political neutrality is a radical political feature in a context where software that is biased towards the developer is the normality.
Software needs to be cheap.
While clean software addresses the imbalance of amplifying power between the developer and the users, cheap software allows more social groups to use that power than simply those with money. At the centers of technological development this is not such an important point because the connection between knowledge and money is more direct. The situation is different in developing countries where knowledge is more abundant than money. Open source software, because it is much cheaper, allows more people to use the amplifying power computers. The decision of the Mexican government to use Linux and not Microsoft in its schools was, at least partly, motivated by the fact that the lower software costs made it possible to install more machines.