But, as engineers become more involved with the production of consumer items, they hold even more tightly to their intellectual property and issues around copyrights and patents become much more important. At one extreme of this scale is microelectronics, where patents appear to be more important than the chips which are produced. Software has traditionally been a consumer item, produced to provide individuals with the tools that they need to enable them to perform their jobs more effectively. But, with the advent of the network, especially the Internet, software is providing more and more infrastructure. That the Internet is infrastructure can be seen from the terms used to describe it.
Software is special in one aspect.
Unlike roads or bridges, the product is not concrete, but is also information and can be transferred and copied as many times as needed. So, rather than just the sharing of ideas about software, the software itself has been opened up to the continual improvement normally found in a body of knowledge. The real open source movement has grown out of the Internet. Products like the BSDs were developed primarily to provide networking infrastructure. BIND and sendmail, and other products were developed to provide services on top of this infrastructure.