Open source as a positive externality for Internet

Photo by AGok

In economics, a positive externality is the indirect impact of a non-directly associated actor in a given transaction. From this perspective, open source can be considered as a positive factor that has encouraged the development and popularity of internet.

"The internet is built upon a constellation of technologies that were written under free software licenses that expressly allowed the copying and reproduction of their code" (Berry, 2008).

One of the first evidences of this idea was the Mozilla community, which has offered softwares such as Firefox and Thunderbird to be freely downloaded and used by internet users. In this way, Mozilla fosters the concept of internet as a “global public resource”.

In a similar way, open source initiatives have contributed to the development of widely popular internet services, such as blogging. A good example is Wordpress, which has grown thanks to the strong community behind the software, which can be freely shared, modified and customised according to specific user needs.

The examples provided have things in common that can be considered as positive externalities for the use of internet. First, these tools are for free. The user doesn’t have to pay for using them and this is of special relevance in the case of developing countries. Second, they can be modified by users and the modifications are shared with the community. This results into the constant improvement of the user experience when using internet through this softwares. Finally, in the case of Wordpress, it has allowed the spread of blogging, one of the most notorious agents in the social web phenomena.