UK needs to be more open to open source

When Gordon Brown has more free time in the near future to wonder how Labour could have done more to enrich society then the words "open source" ought to figure prominently. Open source – the movement in which people all over the world collaborate to create software to run on computers, mobile phones and other devices – offers hope for the future of the world.

Call it what you like: whether it's globalisation with a human face, socialism without the state or capitalism making peace with primeval communism, it doesn't matter. At the level of the nation state there may be powerful centrifugal forces breaking countries up into smaller, more nationalistic, units.

But this is coinciding with even more powerful social forces, enabled by new technology, that are creating global networks such as Facebook, Twitter and the open source software (OSS) movement. Iran may be at odds with the rest of the world but lots of its programmers will be involved in OSS and networks because that is the way the world is going.