The Economist has a series of articles on the economic aspects of software, including an article on open source software: ‘…the open-source movement is less about “world domination”, which hackers often joke about, and more about an industry which, thanks to the Internet, is learning that there is value in deep co-operation as well as in hard competition. “Much more than a cause, the open-source movement is an effect of the Internet,” says Tim O’Reilly, head of an eponymous firm that publishes computer books, and a leading open-source thinker. Open-source is often described as the software industry come full circle. Indeed, in the early days of computing, programs came bundled with the hardware and complete with the source code (the set of computer instructions which are then translated into binary code, the form of software that computers can understand and act on). Pioneers needed to tweak their programs, and were happy to share the improvements they made…’