I used to hear that one of the strengths of Linux was the thousands of volunteers that would help you get a patch or a fix in record time when you reported an issue. That worked well, but not well enough for many companies that really wanted a company to stand behind patches. A few companies, like Red Hat, sold support agreements with the "free as in beer" OS that ended up costing companies almost as much as a regular license of another OS. While Linux is a great system, it hasn't taken over the world like many people thought.

Lately there's been a different flavor of open-ness on the Internet. It seems that so much of what we read and is pushed out to us as news or information is based on the crowd-sourcing of what's popular. Facebook shows a "most active" view, Twitter has trending topics and re-tweets, and many news sites like Reddit use a crowd voting mechanism to help determine what you see first on their front page.

Read the rest of "Data Quality on the Open Web" at SQLServerCentral.