Many of you may already know that I am a web developer in "real life". We use a popular content management system at work that is open source and developed by a very active community.

On http://www.drupal.org I noticed a link to a post by Nick Lewis entitled "Try Explaining This to and MBA". This of course caught my attention and I followed the link.

What followed was an explanation of the recent mini-controversy in the Drupal community regarding the use of a new theme developed for a yet-to-be-released version of Drupal being ported to another CMS.

To make a long story short an e-mail discussion led to the community at WordPress choosing to wait to release the theme until the full version of Drupal was released.

This new theme is very well designed and would definitely benefit the users of the competing system, and due to its being open-source is available for anyone to use however they want.

What this exchange illustrates is that open-source provides a completely new way of thinking about software distribution.

Competing projects can use each others achievements, but hesitate doing so to help a competitor's release have a larger impact.

Open-source is truly about everyone benefiting by having access to the best software, not about the individual reputation of one project or another, or one developer or another.