EDIT: This post has lost a little bit of its poignancy since I fixed the Internet Explorer issue. Meh.

I use Firefox. It’s an open source browser, meaning that anyone who wants to can download the source code, tweak it and make improvements, and submit it back to the online community to evolve the software. This is excellent. Software development is now the domain of a huge number of individuals each with their own ideas, and the software is unhampered by the need to protect intellectual property. This means things happen quickly - Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice, and others have all sprung up incredibly quickly as secure, robust, versatile applications rivaling those put out by Microsoft, despite the latter’s absolutely immense R&D and manpower budget. And they’re free. This last point has huge ramifications for the developing world, since current copyrighted software is prohibitively expensive, often more than the price of the computers they’d be running it on (anyone seen the price of MS Office?). With open source alternatives, more people have access to technology.

And software isn’t it. There’s been a concerted effort to democratize other parts of society through open source developments. Imagine open-source pharmaceuticals, research, scientific journals, journalism, elections, and more. The future is open source, and businesses that fail to recognize this are going to get left behind.

Open source is also why our web site looks like shit. I never bothered to look at it in IE while we were designing it. Oops.

Maybe I’ll try to fix it, but really, you should just download Firefox.