The open source

Here is what I understood from the concept of Open Source:

Open source describes the principle and methods using which one has an open access to production and design of the goods, resources and products. This allows the user to create new revisions of the software contents by either incremental individual efforts or through collaboration.
The name Open Source has got an interesting history. This term was coined out of a strategy session held at Palo Alto, California. It came through an announcement from Netscape in release of its Navigator's source code.Netscape licensed and release their code as Open Source under the name Mozilla.

Most economist agree that Open Source candidate have a public good aspect to them. The original work requires a lot of time, money and efforts. But when someone reproduces it, it's cost decreases. It could be so low that the additional users may be added to low or zero cost. This is called as a marginal cost of product. So, here comes the concept of copyright. When something is copyrighted, you have to pay something to access it. But this cost is more than the cost of making additional copy but less than its original price. Thus the consumers will pay the access cost.

The basic idea of the open source is to reduce the restrictions of the copyrights. This will add to the original work and will get the social benefits. Some argue that since the monetary benefits which one gets from open source are less, there is a less chance of its development. However, history says that larger corporations have often taken over startups who compete with them in development of a particular product. In other way, they intentionally slower down the development of the product. Some counterparts argue that opening the door of development to many will definitely increase the product's capabilities while benefiting the original creator. The creator gets reputation, becomes an expertise in a specific area. He/She consults some software firm where their experience and skills are valued.

How to contribute to Open Source ?
http://today.java.net/pub/pq/18
http://www.kegel.com/academy/opensource.html
http://www.granneman.com/techinfo/linux/contributewithoutcoding.htm

After writing this much, I think I should also try to contribute towards it.
After all, Linus Torvalds must have thought something before saying
'The future is open source'....