That is what has boosted innovation and enhanced productivity. Else you spend a lot of your time and effort in acquiring them. If you are a cook, easy availability of vegetables and other raw materials lets you spend more time on your cooking and serving people. If you are a writer, you can afford to not worry about them if ink and paper are easily available. If you are painter, you can focus on your art if you have paint and canvas available on demand. These are examples where the raw materials you required were easily available.
However, you will have to struggle to get access to the space technology if you are an astronaut and want to go into the space. It will be either expensive or very difficult to get building materials if you want to build a skyscraper. It is not very easy to create a new TV channel today.
Scarcity, makes it difficult to do what you want to do, and in the process it also inflates the cost. And the inflation propagates across all the layers. We are seeing this in natural resources today. With oil getting scarce day by day, fuels like petrol and diesel are getting expensive too. Which means that transportation is getting costly, not only for passengers, but for cargo. Which means that a lot of things, which get transported across some distances, are getting expensive.
Which is what happened when the computer industry started. People could only dream of owning their own computer. The hardware technology was scarce, so was the hardware and hence the computer. Now, it is as easy as a mouse click to buy one with multi-core processors. Easy availability of these computers has brought a revolution in the way we live. Not only the personal computers, but the Internet or the software boom would be unimaginable if the hardware was not easily available.
If you are still with me, this is not a lesson on economics, I am not good at that. But these examples illustrate why scarcity hurts and abundance and easy availability are important. And this is what open source does. Code is an important ingredient for building software, and its easy availability can help in focusing more on rest of the pieces and other aspects of software. For me it helps in building wholesome solutions, not just software. Open source has made code easily available which has led to many others using it as their raw material to build something new and useful out of it.
Note that open source makes the code abundantly available, not cheaply. Even if many times there is no direct monetary cost involved, adopting a certain piece of code involves understanding its abilities and limitations. Otherwise it might hurt more than help and you might soon find yourself in a soup.
Open source also makes easily available a lot of brains which can look at the code and evolve it as the needs change. This is a huge benefit, without the frills of maintaining a huge team. Not that this does not have its duties, but this approach has turned out to be better for solving problems.
Various business models have cropped up around open source. While most of them are around support, Matt Assay has interesting notes.
The general principle seems to be to drive abundance (whatever the means) and then sell minimization of complexity as a value derived from that abundance.
Today, if you are building software, abundance will help you more than scarcity. You can argue that a lot of the richer ones do not employ this, but that is because a phenomenon like open source takes its time to convince an industry. Music industry has slowly started to warm up to its benefits. Though software industry is one of the most explicit examples, it is going to take time for some to shed away the older ways of working. Value of the source code can be different to different people, and making it abundantly available only multiplies the value for everyone.
