But many free software evangelists do argue that their products are higher quality than Microsoft and Netscape's closed-shop bloatware. Free software developers, they argue, stay tightly focused on what Webmasters toiling on the front lines actually need. As Behlendorf notes, "Everything that is done on Apache is done because someone needs it done."

"Apache is 'good enough' for just about everybody," says Linus Torvalds, the coordinator and primary author of the freeware Linux operating system, "and usually it's simply the best when it comes to flexibility, availability and price. And because it's free software, there are a lot of people working on it and keeping it up to date -- and those people aren't so much influenced by marketing decisions as by cold hard facts and by what they themselves need from a Web server."

"You are getting so much complexity these days in the software industry," says Behlendorf, "and so much more of what we do is dominated by software, that to leave the strengths of your business processes up to something that you can't get inside of is a very dangerous situation."

But most important is the strength that comes from being able to tap the collective wisdom of all the other users and experts on the Net.

"When you have a lot of people out there, from various backgrounds, looking at it, developing it, improving it, giving fixes back," says Yahoo's Filo, "that system works really well, and results in quality products."

Freedom, then, doesn't just mean taking the moral high ground, but the pragmatic heights as well. And, in the best of both worlds, the two qualities combine. The developers of Apache express their rationale succinctly on their own Web site, under the subtitle "Why Apache is Free."

"We believe the tools of online publishing should be in the hands of everyone, and software companies should make their money providing value-added services such as specialized modules and support, amongst other things. We realize that it is often seen as an economic advantage for one company to 'own' a market -- in the software industry that means to control tightly a particular conduit such that all others must pay. This is typically done by 'owning' the protocols through which companies conduct business, at the expense of all those other companies. To the extent that the protocols of the World Wide Web remain 'unowned' by a single company, the Web will remain a level playing field for companies large and small."

Critics of free software enjoy observing that most software users lack the skills to take advantage of free software's benefits. And they're correct, to a point. Even free software advocates admit that only a true computer geek may be able to appreciate the joys of Apache, or Linux, or Perl. Most people don't want the opportunity to fix their own software when something goes wrong -- they'd much rather nothing went wrong in the first place, and they think that's what will happen if they write a fat check to Microsoft or Netscape.

"In general terms, we have found that the 'free' or, as we prefer to call it, the 'cooperatively developed' software model works better for technical tools -- operating systems, compilers, networking tools, Web servers -- and the commercial model works better for end-user tools -- dental office billing systems, office suites, etc.," says Bob Young, president of Red Hat Software, a company that sells and supports copies of the Linux operating system.

Access to source code is "a huge competitive advantage with a niche in the marketplace," says John Dawes, group product manager for Netscape's Web server product, the Netscape Enterprise Server. "It's certainly not the mainstream. More and more people want to get on the Web -- but my mom wouldn't know what to do with source code. Most customers don't want to be in the business of maintaining their own software."

And even if the programmers entrusted with running a corporate Web server believe that Apache and Linux offer the best solution for corporate needs, there's still a widespread prejudice in the executive ranks against trusting any "mission critical" application to "freeware."

"You won't see a lot of Fortune 1,000 customers putting Apache on their Web servers," says Jonathan Perera, product manager for Microsoft's Internet Information Server.

"People in corporate situations have a problem dealing with freeware," says Filo. "It's much harder to point fingers when something goes wrong."

Dawes and Perera both shrugged off questions about Apache's market share, dismissing it as essentially irrelevant in the larger commercial picture. The corporate motto at both Netscape and Microsoft is to emphasize the "intranet" while downplaying the Internet. Publicly accessible Web servers aren't where the money is -- the real profits are behind the "firewall" in internal corporate networks. Netscape says it currently dominates that market, although Microsoft is making major inroads, in part by bundling its Web server software with the Windows NT operating system.

But the distinction between intranet and Internet may not be as critical as Microsoft and Netscape believe. To some free software advocates, Apache's success is a beachhead for future assaults on corporate markets.

"The free-software community is more than the sum of its projects," says Eric Raymond. "When Apache gets into a commercial shop, it opens the way for Linux and GCC and free BSD operating systems ... Every Web page that goes up is a blow for decentralization and transparent open standards and against the Microsoft monolith."

"The free-software movement is not yet a threat to Microsoft's dominance of the desktop," says Raymond. "But the Internet is our 'killer app.'"

Certainly, the Internet is what makes possible today's boom in cooperative software development. To some observers, this is a majestic human achievement.

"The most revolutionary software, including the Internet, the World Wide Web, the most widely used Web server (Apache) and the most widely used language for active Web sites (Perl), were all developed by distributed freeware communities," says Tim O'Reilly, founder of the computer publishing house O'Reilly and Associates, at a conference this summer focusing on the Perl programming language. "This makes distributed software development by freely cooperating networks of independent developers the highest form of one of the most significant human inventions."

This is, as hackers would say, non-trivial. It's well known that government funding helped the Internet get off the ground. But from a very early stage in its growth, volunteer programmers donated their time, energy and coding creativity to help improve the network for everyone. This so-called gift economy ethos -- where you contribute to a common good, confident that you will benefit from others' free contributions -- is responsible for Usenet, the Web and countless other applications that make the Internet what it is today.

But one doesn't hear much about the gift economy in 1997 -- indeed, the notion is often dismissed as some kind of quaint, vaguely socialist humbug that today's robust markets can simply ignore. The morphing of the team of programmers who wrote Mosaic into the Netscape Communications Corporation, the privatization of the Internet's backbone and the ominous arrival of Microsoft all add up to what many longtime observers see as a new era on the Net -- less friendly, less idealistic and less fun.

But guess what? Rumors of the gift economy's demise are greatly exaggerated -- Apache, a gift from the Net to the Net, proves it. Perhaps it just hasn't been quite as effective at marketing itself to the mainstream world as Netscape or Microsoft. As one Apache developer, Robert Thau, notes, "volunteers don't advertise." All along, even as gold-rush fever transformed the Net from geek backwater into pop-culture phenomenon, the free software movement has been plugging away, gaining strength, gaining adherents and taking advantage of the Net itself to develop ever better software, for the benefit of all.

Who'd have imagined it? "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs." Truly, a revolutionary concept.

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.