People start out thinking that they'll save on licensing costs because the software is free. But it turns out that more of the financial benefit comes from the network effects associated with the transfer of knowledge, and the interactions that happen between people.

TR: So you see open source as akin to academia?

LEFKOWITZ: Yes. One of the things that open source projects should aspire to is to create the definitive literature for a particular problem domain. The distinction between what one's doing in open source and what one's doing commercially would be the same distinction that one makes between academia and business. Spinoffs of good ideas that originate in academia turn into companies. There's room to push forward both the academic version, which is focused on clarity and exposition, and the commercial version, which is focused on scalability and performance.