I was recently asked, by my (microzombied) friend, "what piece of software represents open source's best software?"
I admit the question caught me off-guard since I thought there were too many examples: apache, php, perl, Linux, netbsd, gcc... I could fill the page and not end. I was tempted, finally, to say EMACS. But trying to explain to him what EMACS is, isn't... Well , that would have required more patience than I had right there and then.
In the end I settled for BIND. BIND as in the de factointernet domain name server. Why BIND? One simple reason. If, somehow it was unlawful to use open source software and you could no longer use BIND the Internet as we know it would shut down almost completely. And here's the kicker: there is a company behind it, a company you can buy support from. (Yes, yes I know there are many other examples of this... but he does not)
Maybe I should have said Apache. Apache is open source software that makes it possible for you to access 70% of the Web's Sites in existence at the time of this writing. Perhaps there is some other OSS application that I don't know, that better represents the achievements of open-source software: bash? kde? firefox? vi?
What would you have said?
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