We, the science guys always have the privilege of “standing on shoulders of giants”. The arts fellows dont have that privilege. Science grows by improving on a previous work. Can art be improved like that ? Can someone repaint the Mona Lisa and make it better ? (or am I asking a stupid question here ?). May be something is possible with the movies, remakes. But Remakes are improved with technology.

I am not trying to make a fight, I was just comparing and the intention of this post is not a comparison between arts and science. Lets move on.

Most of the open source softwares are better than its proprietary competitors because the work is improved continuously. The collective intelligence of every contributer makes the project far far better. The wikipedia is the simplest example of a collaborative effort. It is the largest collaborative project, I believe. There is no encyclopedia that can compete with it, and there will never be any which has such comprehensive information.

The concept of standing on shoulders of giants is very evident in computer science. The source code is the work and it can be changed easily. And this has led to change in business models. Microsoft made money by selling their products and new generation companies are making money by giving support for products that are developed by the community.