The Open Source Business in New Zealand

Abstract

Moviemakers like to fantasise about the future with new technologies we can only start to imagine. While it is entertaining to watch The Matrix, Minority Report or Surrogates, somehow there is always a glitch in that extremely sophisticated system that is just about to kill millions of people if not corrected. Would the stories be told differently if those systems had been built using open source software? It is quite possible that most anomalies would have be reported and then fixed by volunteers in the open source community before things started getting out of control. The features and functionality of the software would expand to satisfy the different needs of a growing number of users. If many people were dissatisfied with the software, it would become forked and a new version would be created to compete with the old one, and the cycle of improvements would continue. The probability of the entire human race relying on a single piece of vendorspecific software system for survival would be low; the collective and self-correcting nature of open source software would save the day.