Open source's untapped potential

The growing popularity of the Linux operating system has drawn attention to a style of software development in which volunteers, collaborating over the Internet, can create programs that are cheaper, even arguably better, than those that emerge from paid staffers working at high- tech firms. Now a new book argues that the style of development dubbed open source -- so-called because the working innards, or source code, are published freely -- has the potential to revolutionize not just the software and high-tech industries, but biotechnology, publishing and other fields.

"Open source is not just for hackers. It's a new way of organizing people to create complex products in a knowledge-based economy,'' said Steven Weber, author of "The Success of Open Source,'' from Harvard University Press.

Weber, a professor of political science at UC Berkeley, naturally starts his analysis by recounting how, more than a decade ago, Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds enlisted a growing group of software developers in an effort to build the free operating system that became Linux -- a moniker that blended its inventor's name with Unix, the software on which it's modeled.

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