Open source development and the World Wide Web: a certain tension.

The development of the World Wide Web over the course of the past ten years has run rampant. The course it has taken has been both swift and unpredictable. The largest distributed system in the world began as a utopian notion of an interconnected and open web of information, the dream of the academic and intellectual alike. Today it is indeed a massive interconnected web of communication and content, but the content, largely on the more popular, if not pornographic, end of the mass media spectrum, is not what the founders intended.Coinciding with the rapid growth of the web has been the equally speedy rise of the open source development community, which can best be understood as a distributed system in its own right. Indeed, the development of the web has been, outside of the Linux project, the largest arena for open source development. And current trends, witnessed by such significant open source projects as Mozilla and Apache, seem to suggest that the open source way of doing things is quickly becoming the web way of doing things. However, there is a certain tension growing between those who would like to control, for economic profit or for the gratification of control itself, the direction of the web's development and those open source developers who are responsible for a large portion of that growth. This paper explores the natural relationship, as well as the growing tension within this relationship, between the open source development community and the World Wide Web.