Submitted by infojunkie on Sat, 2007-05-05 14:20.
Perhaps better entitled "Open Source as Jazz, and Linux as its popular standard".
In jazz, each musician improvises his part in the tune's performance. Knowing the skeletal structure of the tune, the musician applies his knowledge of harmony, rhythm and melody, along with some social knowledge of his fellow musicians, to produce meaningful phrases, amounting to intelligible overall statements. In doing so, the jazz band collectively creates a spontaneously original variation on a theme.
A Linux user also participates in the continuous recreation of his system. From writing shell scripts to automating simple tasks, through submitting bug reports and code patches to open source projects, to hacking kernel modules or desktop environments, nothing in Linux is the last word and thus improvisation is always needed.