The internet is 10 this week. Well, no, of course it isn’t. It’s been around in some form or another since 1969. But a leader in today’s Guardian says that this week is being celebrated as the tenth anniversary of the internet as a mass phenomenon – and I can’t really argue with that.
Interestingly, the leader goes on to emphasise the connections between the internet and the Open Source movement.
Although, contrary to the instincts of its early protagonists, the web has long since been colonised by commerce, it still nurtures its founding community spirit. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the startling success of the open source movement which enables enthusiasts and professionals all over the world to work together from remote locations to produce services that are freely available for anyone with a computer linked to the internet. The thousands of products so far released include the Linux operating system (a free alternative to Microsoft’s pervasive Windows), OpenOffice (an alternative to Microsoft’s Word and Excel) and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, with well over a million entries written entirely by its readers.
Ten years ago you would never have read about Open Source software[1] in the leader column of a national newspaper. Now that’s progress.
[1] Or, as it was called back then, “free software”.