Information wants to be free. Licensing and tech-support, on the other hand...

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click Online | Open source turns money-spinner:

"The movement believes strongly that rather than being a trade secret, the source code of the software should be open for anyone to play with.

The result is software like the Linux operating system, created through collaboration that can involve thousands of programmers.

"Early on, when software was developed by computer scientists, just people working with computers, people passed around software because that was how you got computers to do things," explained Tim O'Reilly, the founder and CEO of computer information and publishing company O'Reilly Media.

"What we take as the shape of the software industry today, where software is shrink-wrapped and sold, is really a 20-year anomaly that started in the 1980s.

"Now we have companies like Microsoft as the avatars of that movement. But by the mid-80s there were already people saying 'we don't like this'."

And what they did not like was the idea of closing off information, especially information that others could build on.

The open source movement does not object to making money. In fact, many of these programmers can afford to be choosy about how they earn.

The source code may be free, but there is gold in software support, training and publishing.

Damian Conway, who trains programmers through his business Thoughtstream, said: "I think the most successful of those is definitely licensing support; providing the software and then saying: 'if you want to buy a support contract, here's what it will cost you on an ongoing basis'.

"That way people are getting something that they can work with free if they want to, but when they get into trouble they have backup and you make some money out of it." "