Abhijit Nadgouda says it's been a decade since the term open source was chosen to represent the concept.  This is true, but the concept has been around far longer.  I remember reading through freely available source code to BBS systems back in the mid-late 80's to discover their secrets.  Long before that, software was freely given away with source code by hobbyists.

With such a long and rich history, it seems somewhat strange that "open source" is just now enjoying its 15 minutes of fame.  Sure, it has forever changed the way software is created and consumed, but why now all of a sudden?

I believe it's just the right time and place to happen.  The ubiquitous tools of the Information Age finally make it trivial for large numbers of diverse and geographically separated people to collaborate towards a shared goal about which they are passionate.  In the olden days, it was a real pain to dial-up point-to-point with each computer you wanted to explore.  It took a lot of manual labor just to find interesting computers, let alone exchange information with them.  It was also tedious to hold a simple on-line conversation with somebody at 110 baud where you could see the characters being displayed one or two at a time.  The concept of open source still flourished, but there was just too much overhead involved to break into the mainstream.

Nowadays, with fast Internet connections, great search engines, and excellent collaboration tools (written by the open source community), it's almost effortless to find open source software, join a community, contribute something back, or even create your own project. 

In fact, it's almost too easy to create your own project.  It's so easy that there are approximately 200,000 open source projects in the wild today.  Most of them are defunct, abandoned, or just plain not very good.

In the olden days, it took so much effort to go through the mechanics of setting up and maintaining a project that you had to have something really important to say (in the form of code) before you'd spend the energy.  This meant that there were far fewer projects, but they were of generally higher quality, on average, than we see today.

In other words, the downside of open source is that anybody can create a project and a pretty web site in a matter of hours.  The hard part is coming up with something truly useful that will be well-managed, well-maintained, and will foster a dynamic and active community over time.

To stretch an old saying perhaps a bit too much, open source projects are like opinions, everybody's got one (and most of them stink?).  There's no "editor" in the world of open source, which is part of the reason I created OpenLogic.  We filter down those 200,000 open source projects into a more manageable list of a few hundred that make sense for large enterprises. 

So, everybody has an open source project and everybody has a blog.  I can only hope this one makes it into the "truly useful" category some day.