Open Source rocks my world and should make everybody happy. It works like this: somebody "invents" something, somewhere, that's really great and tons of people will want to use. Anyone who wants to replicate or work with that invention can do so for free. There is no licensing agreement required. You make your thing work with their thing, and together the collective value of the system increases. Very utopian however, because that vision is a very naive view of the process.

What do you think normally happens when people invent something, assuming that it was something they set out to do? If they're financially motivated, in today's world, they will most likely proceed to patent it, immediately, in as many countries as they can afford. In this process, inventors stand to make a significant ammount of money, assuming their patents and/or trademarks are acknowledged and enforced in the countries where their idea has caught on. And assuming people around the world pay full price for it, and the distributors or licensees remit their fees as set out in the licensing agreement.

But here's the catch. If nobody likes the invention, nothing happens, and the inventor just wasted a ton of cash on patent and trademark searches and filing applications. As a result, most of the inventors who use the patent and trademark laws to their economic benefit have a vested interest in maintaining the current capitalist system. This is completely understandable.

Suppose you are a particularly clever inventor and/or owner of other patents and/or trademarks. Those other patents/trademarks may account for a significant source of your annual revenue. In that case having your investment protected by expensive legal and filing fees makes a lot of sense. Ipso facto, any self-serving inventor who has put all that money into patents and trademarks is probably looking to make a significant amount of money off the invention. Whatever it may be. The best part is, they don't even have to make it work or do anything, just file the idea. This is the how some companies make a LOT of money.

But even if there is no interest in monetary compensation (or at least less than those other inventors) there still needs to be a rally of support for the invention to the degree that it becomes adopted and entrenched in society. Otherwise it disappears, possibly for good. But if it's a really fantastic idea, and is reasonably accessible (meaning, affordable) it can take off like bottle rockets. In the past we've had such runaway hits as the wheel and the hammer. More recently, the iPod and the Wii. At some point, someone (or group) has a great idea, and it catches on.

This is the driving force behind the Open Source community, which is based on a system of openness and accessibility, with the goal of bringing an overall improvement of everyone's quality of life. Not surprisingly, a lot of hippies, hackers, and artsy geeks are into the Open Source movement. As a result, you get things like FFmpeg. This amazing set of libraries allows you to encode, convert, and stream various audio and video file formats. An number of individuals and groups have ported the tools to various operating systems, so anyone with a computer can use it, for free. Artists are poor, as a general rule. Video artists are probably the poorest of the bunch. FFmpeg is a godsend for video artists.

The only problem is it's illegal in some countries, or may be depending on how you use it.