The full potential of open-source software is only just starting to emerge

Fifteen years ago this month, when the internet was the domain of the geeky and the good, a young computer science student from Finland sent an e-mail to a message list of programmers. "Hello everybody out there using Minix," began the message, "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like GNU) . . ."

Linus Torvalds couldn't have been more wrong. In fact, his e-mail led to the completion of GNU, the free operating system that had been in construction since 1983 by a small team in the US, led by the renegade programmer and godfather of free software Richard Stallman. The result was GNU/Linux, now commonly shortened to Linux, an operating system that is free to download, use and share.

To Stallman's "copyleft" licence, a clever alteration of the copyright system that allowed programmers to share and modify code without falling foul of intellectual property law, Torvalds coupled the ability to harness the skills and downtime of programmers plugged in to the nascent internet. It was an explosive combination. In 2001, it was estimated that 8,000 man-years had been invested in building Linux, most of this voluntarily. Had this feat been attempted by a commercial software company, the cost would have been in excess of $1bn.

Now, in 2006, many non-geeks are beginning to hear about open-source programming, as the practice has come to be known. It's estimated that Linux runs more than half of all the machines that deliver the websites we view on the internet. And although non-techies still prefer commercially developed operating systems such as Mac OS X and Windows for powering their PCs, the fact that Linux is free and can run on low-spec machines is making it popular in developing-world markets - and making Microsoft increasingly worried.

And yet, despite its widespread adoption, the political classes are more likely to have heard of open source in a metaphorical context. The phenomenal success of one man's "hobby" has come to symbolise the internet's power to harness distributed resources and create information goods far richer than those produced by commercial organisations. Witness Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia with over four million articles. Or SETI@home, the project of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley that uses the processor downtime of more than five million home computers to search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Yochai Benkler's recent economic study of all things distributed, The Wealth of Networks, is a must-read for anyone keen to comprehend what this means for society and business in the 21st century. Open source may already be 15 years old, but only now are we beginning to understand its place in the future.

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