Hidden benefits of open source

Open source benefits even people who buy proprietary products

On a free market, prices are set by competition. Without competition, prices are high. A top product can cost more only as long as it is better than the alternatives. If the price gap grows too big, the competition gets a chance to grow.

Open source competes with paid products too. It pushes down the prices of all products and sets a base set of features that should be free everywhere. When top products get too expensive, people are more willing to invest in open source tools - and the better those tools are, the cheaper the paid products get.

What if

What if there were no open source at all? Read about Netscape and what Microsoft wanted to do with the internet. Open source made them lose control of the market. It protected us from higher prices and from too much power in private hands. Without open source the software market would be very expensive and hostile. Even MS Windows contains a lot of BSD code.

So please speak well of the open source world, even if it isn’t always top quality.

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