The title of this post is a reference to the way Free and Open Source software in general, and Linux specifically, have shown the way to escape the prison of proprietary software and the concept, perhaps, of intellectual property. In Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, he states:

As many of you are aware, the FreeDesktop.org project aims at bringing together some common aspects of the free desktop. However, when developing applications, one is still forced to focus either on GTK or QT and in doing so direct their product at one audience predominantly. QT apps can run in Gnome (or Xfce) and GTK apps in KDE, however they don't look fully integrated. Furthermore, because of the fundamental coding differences between GTK and QT

When astronomers think about the Big Bang, in general they don't actually mean that one singular moment when the Universe burst into being. It's really the name given to the model used to describe what happened an infinitesimally thin slice of time after that moment. The basic trouble is that Einstein's relativity gives us a good description of some things (large scale gravity, for example), and quantum mechanics tells us about other things (how particles behave), but no one has ever successfull