The term “open source” was coined in 1998, the year that the company behind Netscape decided to give away their source code, an event that started to pave the way for a new form of sharing knowledge and building together in the open. Never in the history of human-kind have we had the possibility to change how things work collectively, as knowledge has been usually stored in books, or in the brains of a few humans that may or may not have shared it with others. Today you can be a participant on how the future of money evolves by contributing to the development of Bitcoin with your own ideas.

And this is just the beginning, almost all inventions that have been created across time, had an entity who owned them in order to protect it, but now we have a role in this play, and many companies noticed that by liberating their ideas and making them open to contributors, they were able to build stronger products and form a community around them, while others saw this as an opportunity to cut costs as they could simply grab someone else’s solution for free. But there’s a catch, software needs to be updated, maintained and from time to time something will fail, implying that a person needs to be behind to ensure it keeps working, and it could be a possibility that the one who built it, or the contributor that took over the project, may have a better idea on where they should be spending their time.