BusinessWeek has a great interview with Linus Torvalds, which doesn’t say much new stuff but nicely summarizes some general open-source approaches for less-technical business leaders (the usual BusinessWeek audience). In it, there is one great Linus quote that my friend David highlighted:

I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It’s the right way to do things. I compare it to science vs. witchcraft. In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people’s results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it -- but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it.

Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can’t have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in knowledge.

Wow, I’d never thought of it that way before, but that’s exactly it. He makes the point later on that infrastructure is especially suited for the open-source approach for this reason, and it’s very true. With on-going progress, it’s still entirely possible to have a small ISV build a great app for a specific market (Adobe’s Photoshop, for example), but over time, it will be harder to maintain an advantage over other developers through thousands of proprietary API bugs. Infrastructure is just too important.