Building on one another’s work

I love that open source software exists.

Not that I use it regularly. I use macOS rather than Linux. I use ChatGPT and Claude rather than one of the open-weight alternatives. In fact, most of the software I rely on every day is commercial.

What I value most about open source is how it allows thousands of people with different knowledge and interests to build on one another’s work—often enabling better approaches to come to the fore. (The scientific process and Wikipedia work much the same way.)

Consider Firefox. The open-source browser restored competition to a stagnant market dominated by Internet Explorer. It popularized user interfaces like tabbed browsing that are now table stakes for every browser on every platform. And it spurred a revolution in how websites are built by demonstrating what open standards like CSS could actually make possible.

I spent hours exploring the CSS Zen Garden website and digging into its submissions. Dozens of designers took the exact same HTML and, by changing only the CSS, produced wildly different sites. It showed how people could learn from one another by studying, borrowing, and adapting each other’s work.

Nearly every piece of software you and I use was shaped somewhere upstream by code people gave away for others to build on.