On 30 April 1993 the laboratory behind the creation of the worldwide web, CERN, announced that its WWW software would be free for anyone to use. Its inventor,
Tim Berners-Lee, had developed the first www pages in 1991. Deliberately, no patent was lodged and it remains nonproprietary and open. The philosophy behind that decision continues today and is more commonly known as open source software.

There are open source alternatives to all major commercial software programs. Not only are web sites designed with a royalty-free code, (HTML), but the largest web search engine in the world, Google, is run on Linux - an open source operating system. More recently, open source has been seen as a direct threat to commercial interests - in particular those of Microsoft, which has labeled open source as dangerous and anti-competitive.

The danger to Microsoft from free alternatives comes not from some anti-competitive or security issue, but from the fact that these alternatives are as usable and flexible as anything designed by Microsoft. This holds particularly true with regard to open source products such as Firefox, VLC media player, Openoffice, and Abiword - all of which compete favourably with Microsoft's Internet explorer, Media Player, and office software.

The appeal of these free programs to financially-challenged researchers such as labour historians is self-evident.The philosophical and ideological aspects of open source hold no harm either. But open source software works. That's the main point.