The Open Source Future

One of the major factors which will fuel Linux and other open source projects' development will be the developing world. I was listening to a podcast about Ardour, an open source digital audio workstation. One of the interesting things which was mentioned was the ability of members of the community to sponsor code. That is, a person can offer a bounty to have bugs fixed or features added. The fact that incomes vary very widely across the globe can actually help a lot here. Most of the consumers of this software are located in the developed world and have higher incomes than the developing world. As people in areas which have very low average incomes become more technically savvy in software development using free software, some of them will be able to earn nice incomes using their knowledge. This is outsourcing writ large.