In exploring the benefits of Open Source Sacred Music, the only reasonable model for comparison is, of course, Open Source software. While the analogy breaks down at some critical points (music is content, while software is a tool), I believe there is still much to be learned from the Open Source software movement, particularly in terms of commercial business practice and community involvement.

That being said, this comparison tends to draw some immediate criticism along the lines of "most people don't really use Open Source software." The relative market-share of Open Office vs. MS Office, Linux vs. Windows and Mac, or LilyPond vs. Finale and Sibelius are shown as examples proving that Open Source is inconsequential- buggy software used by people who can't afford the "real thing."

Regardless of your views on Intellectual Property, or how much legitimate analogy you see between software and music, the idea that Open Source is relatively inconsequential in the world of software is simply inaccurate, a gross misunderstanding of the Open Source software ecology.

While there are a handful of moderately-successful consumer-oriented Open Source projects (Open Office, for example), the real success of Open Source has been among developers and infrastructure. By this I don't just mean that computer geeks are more willing to put up with bugs and glitches and uncompiled source code (although that's true, they are). What I mean is that Open Source software has become the de facto "standard" for the infrastructure that runs modern computing and development.

The vast majority of websites are run on servers with an Open Source operating system (Linux). The web-server software running on most of those machines is also Open Source (Apache). The database software running the vast majority of dynamic websites is Open Source (MySQL). The most popular languages, development tools, frameworks, content management systems and testing suites are all Open Source. Even the most closed-down, vendor-controlled marketplace ever conceived, the iOS App Store, has been infiltrated by Open Source development tools, thanks to the PhoneGap project, which allows developers to write native iOS apps using the most common and popular (and Open Source) web development languages and tool sets. (Not to mention that fact that most Apps communicate with a web server during operation, which is most likely running on Open Source software.)

So what? What parallel might be drawn between this and the needs/realities of the Sacred Music world?
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