The power to route around bottlenecks
If there is a problem on a router between your PC and this item, the Internet Protocol will find another way. Thus the network increases in redundancy and robustness as it grows.
Open source has the same trait. When problems occur with licenses, with personalities, or with code, we can route around them. We can fork the code, we can create new code, we can write new licenses which better meet our needs.
And innovation continues.
Throughout this decade the whole industry has been routing around a really big bottleneck, the Bell monopolies. As they grow in power, we pay more-and-more for fewer-and-fewer bits. I could go on all day about how unfair this is, but I'd rather focus on solutions.
So would most people.
Google Gears is one solution. It keeps you from losing work when the connection to a network application is severed. Google is giving it a BSD license so it can be incorporated into proprietary as well as open source products.
The Gimp is another solution. Unisys decided it could turn the .gif format, which has been distributed free for years, into a cash cow. The Gimp and its .XCF file extension routed around it. And it does Windows -- it's great. The .gif patent is now expiring, and I don't care.
The same thing is likely to happen to MP3, now that Alcatel has won a big award from Microsoft on it and is preparing to sue everyone else who uses it. We can route around it, creating a new, better format which does not tread on Alcatel's claims, and when it comes to us for money it will find nothing.
As with The Gimp, the new open source file standard is likely to be much better, not just for being free but for having years of general advances in compression to take advantage of.
History will call this the Gadget Decade because we're routing around the Bells. By putting real power in new kinds of clients, we require less of the network. You take your music with you, and call the network only when you need to.
The only real demand we should make of Microsoft in this whole patent mess, as Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu said recently, is this power to route around the bottleneck. Tell us where the claimed violations are, and we'll fix them.
My only problem with all this is it can blind us to injustices, like the Bell monopoly. Taking it as a challenge allows the injustice to continue. But we'll get to that in time.