Community / Philosophy
Some skilled programmers are committed to concepts like freedom of information, and the idea
that technological advances should benefit all people, not just one corporation or individual. Many
sciences use an environment of peer review and sharing information to advance their fields, and this
also happens with computer software.
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Education
Students of computer science work on software as part of their education. The end result
is usually software of excellent quality, and is released under GPL or BSD or similar.
Open source software is excellent for this use, as the students have complete access to the source code
to work on.
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Credentials / Status
For a programmer or IT specialist, it really boosts the CV to be able to claim you were on
the team that developed some useful software system. While it is hard work, many people have found it
opens opportunities for employment or for selling their services commercially.
In the open source community, your work is critically reviewed by highly skilled peers and users. To
earn respect and acclaim here brings a social standing and status that money can't buy.
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Self Interest
Of all software written, only a small portion is sold commercially. A very large amount is
developed by companies for their own use. This is very expensive.
Some companies have found that by taking the development so far, then making the software open, they can
gain from development efforts of others. With this input, they get a better product at a lower cost.
They don't loose anything, as they weren't going to sell the software commercially anyway.
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Market Strategy
There are some companies that would dearly like to see an end to Microsoft's monopoly in the
computer / IT market. So much so, that they would be willing to pay $billions to see this happen.
If this means contributing $billions to the development of Linux and other open source projects, so be it.
IBM and Sun Corporation are two examples of this approach.
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