What are the differences between commercial production and community produsage?

Open source software is a good example of how a community can create a product without the use of a company. It is true that with the help of a company like Google and its resources a quality product can be produced. Although, which is more important, money or information? With the ability of the internet to communicate various types of information and knowledge in real time, the possibilities of open source software seem endless.

Mozilla Firefox has definitely proved popular among the web, targeting Microsoft's Internet Explorer. One of the reasons why this has proved popular is its ability to deliver a web browser that is simply more user friendly due to the input from regular web users. It makes you wonder why the large corporations cannot design software this good in the first place. One of the reasons is because of the slow process of developing a product because of all the departments and regulations involved. With open source, you have the knowledge of the whole internet community to gather a fully functional program together. One of the successes of open source is that it has changed the way that large companies work as they have to keep up with successful open source software.

However, there are also problems that exist in the current open source environment. It is difficult to advertise without money and therefore many open source projects would be hard to discover. Secondly, with the large companies like Microsoft and Adobe, with their exclusive features and file formats, it would be difficult to market an open source product as a standard or default program. Take Linux for example, the product started as its own operating system, as Microsoft and Apple were not open source, so to create an open source product, it needed to start from scratch. You have to give credit to the large companies like Microsoft though, as they did develop the original software and without that, open source would not have been able to produce software. Open source software could be thought of as a way to take advantage of any flaws in commercially developed software and it does have the added benefit of time and the ever increasing knowledge of web users.

I recently found an open source program called Miro, a project founded under the name of the "Participatory Culture Foundation". I have not actually used the program, though I am considering downloading it. It apparently lets you freely view television, a concept named open tv. With the success of YouTube, video is such a large part of internet consumption these days. So I Googled 'open tv' and it found 72,100,000 hits for me. Clearly, open source is a major part of the web and a great example of how the internet acts as a friendly community of sharing. Open source is really becoming highly competitive with commercial computer professionals. It is obvious that people really want to have a legal alternative to commercial production.