With the same fervor that rallied the open-source free software movement, members of such groups as Seattle Wireless, in Seattle, Washington, SFLan in San Francisco and Consume.net in London are bolting radio antennas to their roofs and broadcasting a shared invisible connection to their friends down the block.

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The notion that free code should beget more free code is central to the open-source movement, but it's a sticky point to companies, like Cisco Systems, that make a living off of intellectual property.

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However, the biggest challenge to Sun's dominance may come not from the old enemy in Redmond, but from Linux, a free operating system that is a product of the open-source movement.

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SFLan and similar efforts such as Consume.net (in London), Guerrilla.net (in Cambridge, Massachusetts), and Seattle Wireless are reminiscent of the open-source movement, whose members contribute to free software such as the operating system Linux.

ECONOMIST: The wireless Internet: A LAN line | The

According to Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief technical officer, as the open-source movement grows, it will get better at producing free clones of commercial software.

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But one genome pioneer is taking the opposite approach: imitating the open-source movement of computer science, which argues that technology works best when it is given away for free so that everyone can collaborate on it.

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