Open-Source Software Is Worth a Lot More Than You Pay for It
Free products that users can modify and share may well be the greatest “public goods” markets have ever produced.
Deceptively valuable.
Photographer: Science & Society Picture Librar/SSPLOpen-source software may well be the greatest “public good” the market economy has ever produced. What it shows is the power of voluntary social cooperation.
Standard neoclassical economic theory holds that goods and services with widespread benefits get produced only if their maker can charge customers for them. Open-source software — defined as “something people can modify and share because its design is publicly accessible” — unquestionably has widespread benefits, yet it is free. Think of the Mozilla Firefox browser, VLC Media Player, the Python programming language or Linux-based operating systems. Many companies, including Meta and Mistral, are pioneering open-source AI.