Millions of contributors build software together without a single employer organizing their effort.
In 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds posted a message to an online newsgroup announcing a free operating system kernel he was building as a hobby. He invited anyone to contribute. That kernel became Linux, and it now runs the majority of the world's servers, all Android phones, and most of the global cloud computing infrastructure.1
The idea that valuable software could be built by volunteers coordinating without a central employer had precedents. Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project in 1983 and the Free Software Foundation in 1985, establishing the principle that source code should be freely shared, studied, and modified.2 The term "open source" itself was coined in 1998 at a strategy session organized by Christine Peterson, Eric Raymond, and others, who wanted a label less ideologically charged than "free software."3
The scale of open source production defies conventional assumptions about motivation and management. GitHub, the largest platform for collaborative software development, reported over 100 million developers using the platform by 2023.4 Contributors work across time zones, often without financial compensation, following norms enforced by peer review rather than supervisory authority.
The economic value is enormous. A 2024 study by Harvard Business School researchers estimated the demand-side value of widely used open source software at $8.8 trillion, and found that if open source were to disappear, firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on their software.5 The model suggests that neither employment nor monetary payment is a prerequisite for large-scale, high-quality production.