In the new climate, governments in the 

United States and around the world

began to question the wisdom of relying on proprietary code, which they could
neither examine nor modify. Open-source advocates argued, with some
success, that reliance on proprietary software could leave governments open
to dangerous security breaches that software providers might be slow to fix. In
contrast, they argued that the independent scrutiny of open-source programs
offered the most effective possible audit. More political pressure developed
when governments outside the United States began to wonder why they were
paying large licensing fees to foreign corporations, especially when open
source would make it possible to localize software for
language communities too small for those foreign corporations to invest in
serving.

In Raymond’s view, the shift to open source is being forced by the failure of
other software verification methods to scale up as software becomes more
complex—a view that has moved from mere speculation to nearly conventional
wisdom within the open-source community. There remains, however, some
political tension in the community between free software purists and
pragmatists, with the former sometimes insisting on an identity separate from
the rest of the open-source movement. This fissure roughly parallels the split
between GPL and non-copyleft licences such as BSD and MIT.

Technically, the open-source community remains close to its UNIX roots. The
largest and most important faction remains the development network around
the Linux operating system, which is fast eclipsing older UNIX variants. Other
prestigious and significant open-source projects include the Apache World
Wide Web server, the Firefox Web browser, the Perl and Python computer
languages, and Stallman’s Emacs editor.

While Stallman, Torvalds, and Raymond have been relatively reluctant to

discuss the application of open-source principles outside of software, others
have been inspired by them. Wikipedia, a free, user-edited online
encyclopaedia, was founded in explicit imitation of the open-source
programming movement, as was the open publications movement in the
sciences (see Internet: Electronic publishing) and the open genomics
movement in