Sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling on open source:

What's the real price you pay for free software? The real price you pay is having to bow the knee to the weird organizational model and the freaky, geeky social values that prop that up. If you're the user, you have to hang out with Linux freaks.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/08/05/sterling.html?page=1

From Newsforge: An argument for using open source to close the digital divide. It's rather obvious, to be sure, open source as a way of democratizing software for those who can't afford it, but as we've noted here before, it will take some time for this to work out on a global level because of language barriers. This is a good open source primer too, for newbies like me. It made me want to go Linux for sure! I'm going to download Open Office in a minute.

Openchallenge.org calls programmers to publish their

ZDNet reports that RealNetworks has reverse engineered Microsoft's Media Player streaming audio server software and will begin offering a server version which can stream QuickTime, Windows Media, and RealMedia.

But the interesting part is buried at the end of the article. RealNetworks also announced that they would begin releasing portions of their code as open source as early as this fall. Perhaps within a couple of years, we'll see open source media players that rival RealPlayer and Windows Media Player, much as Mozilla has now become competitive with Internet Explorer. And maybe, if we're lucky, this marks a new trend among Microsoft's competitors.