I know it seems a little far-fetched, but the globalization possible due to technology has caused a lot of conflict and strife in terms of politics, business practices, etc. The open source movement, which became prominent mostly through projects like Apache, Firefox, and especially Linux, is one of the best examples we have so far for the potential good of globalization--where people are coming together across the world irrespective of race, religion, or nationality and working toward a common goal for the greater good of the entire world (or at least the part of the world who benefits from their software). It's a model for the potential of global peace and cooperation.

Not saying Linus is by any means a shoe-in for it, but I don't think it's an absurd idea.

In terms of government it is considerably harder to make bring these things into existence and to remove them once they're already there. Changing it after it already exists is trivial. And that's what's important and significant about this: it exists. The general population has facilitated access to something that was obscure and hidden behind a wall of government before. This may not seem like much but I think the successful creation of this type of transparency throughout the government, and if possible embedding it systemically into government processes, that we will see a great improvement in terms of freedom, success, and efficiency of our government.

It's similar to the way open source applications always get bugs patched faster than commercial implementations--crowdsourcing is a good way to catch errors. That will undoubtedly apply to government as well, especially when many politicians make their living relying on their practices being obscured from the public.

IBM deserves an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for this!!! This problem has persistently plagued me for ages! I'm glad someone finally came up with a solution to this. My only recourse up to this point has been to avoid SSN fields on any web form. If my boss wants something that requires a unique personal identifier I tell him it can't be done--not unless he wants to hire a team of interns to parse whatever voodoo people put into that SSN field!

Thank you so much for this new knowledge IBM! Now if we can do something about phone number fields I'll be in web developer heaven!