functionality in the form of CGI scripts, inline JavaScript, server-side Java, or ASP, the boundaries of human-computer communication and human- human communication are increasingly blurred. The vibrancy of the computer industry may, in the end, be a reflection of the vibrancy of our communication with each other.
Innovation and Evolution
One of the problems of commercial product devel- opment is that the focus is on creating products that will make a profit for their creators. There are many products that meet real needs that are either too spe- cialized or too early to market to produce the return on investment that either a large company or a ven- ture-backed startup demands.
In fact, many open-source projects have been started to solve a user’s particular problem. The return on investment is the solution to the problem. But what the early open-source developers realized was that by giving away their work to the networked com- munity of like-minded developers, they might get an additional dividend of functionality returned by other users of the product.
It was the coincident evolution of wide-area computer networking that gave the real impetus to open source. Previously, user communities were cen- tered around vendors and their products. But the pos-