It is riven by religious schisms and periodically explodes into flame wars over technicalities that might strike the outsider as enormously picayune. Still, despite their differences, free software developers share the belief that their movement is not only the Internet's past but its future. I'm not an Apache developer, but I nevertheless think of their success as 'ours' rather than 'theirs,' and they feel the same way whenever Linux or GCC scores another design win. The first thing to understand about free software is that it is not necessarily free. The typical software company guards its source code like a pack of pit bulls standing watch over crown jewels.
Source code is considered the core intellectual property upon which the software industry is built.
The point is, if something goes wrong, you don't need to wait around for Microsoft or Netscape to answer your support calls. If you discover a bug or you need some new function, you can just roll up your sleeves and start mucking about with the code yourself. And more often than not, someone else already encountered the same problem and posted a fix to the Net. It's just a lot easier when you have total control over it. However, there are different kinds of total control.