I was recently discussing religion with someone and it was pointed out that religion tends to divide over time and science tends to unite. It's pretty obvious when you look at the world. As religions grow to encompass more people, and thus more viewpoints, they tend to form conflicting groups. As scientists grow to understand new things, old ideas mostly die out once a good experiment is discovered. Even Aristotle and the Roman Catholic church have, over time, knelt to this irrepressible cornerstone of science: a simple repeatable demonstration of a phenomenon, an experiment.
Forget about that for a second and let's think about open source programmers.
When you use the phrase "Open Source" the slashdot crowd wants you to believe that we are referring to a strict policy of voluntarily relinquished property rights. These open source programmers generally discard their intellectual property rights in exchange for a better program. It's kind of assumed that the closed source programmers will eventually see the light, and enough seem to be doing so that for the most part we see no value in illegally violating another's intellectual property rights.
So imagine Joe Blow goes to CompUSA and buys a computer. Then he calls up Time Warner Cable and orders a cable modem. Then he downloads Kazaa and proceeds to download all of the songs he remembers so fondly from his college days, but lost the cassettes years ago. Then the next week maybe he downloads some new stuff a friend recommended. Then a year later, he downloads the new Madonna video because someone told him there was a single frame of full frontal nudity in it.
Does this sound familiar to you? Have you done these actions, have you seen people do these actions? Even if you're opposed to these sorts of actions, do you believe they're possible? Practical? Easy?
Of course you do, because that hypothetical Joe Blow story can be conducted by each and every one of us as an experiment. And many of us have found already that you can get just about any information you want off of the internet for a low cost which doesn't really vary much whether you get a little bit of information or a lot of information. Doesn't really cost any more to download Microsoft Office than it does to download the public domain works of William Shakespear.
And so, through the process of science, Joe Blow is learning what open source evangelists have been saying for decades (although not in the way they intended): intellectual property is obsolete.
And so I come back to open source, where patent and licensing battles in the courts are a constant possibility. And I think to myself, "when it comes time to conduct the experiment, will I still be able to use this now-illegal technology when the court case comes?" and so far it's always been "yes" (i.e., DeCSS, MP3 decoders, video game console emulators, etc.). Who can stand in the face of maximum utility?
We've watched the efforts of the RIAA and MPAA, of Microsoft and SCO, and they haven't changed the outcome of that basic experiment. And so it is, science marches on. Another fact is discovered, and inexorably, more and more people will come to accept it. Someday, perhaps a long time from now, it will be as socially accepted as the heliocentric solar system. Information is free. Accept it as an axiom. Morals don't apply.