My Year Of Living Open Source

Editor's note: Sam Muirhead is a videographer who for one year is abandoning proprietary products and instead using and producing open source materials.

(CNN) -- It started a few years ago, as I was spiraling down one of Wikipedia's endless information rabbit holes.

I already had as many trains of thought as I had tabs open, and yet, somewhere between the fall of the Roman Empire and the chemical properties of copper, another little thought managed to burrow a space for itself: I started to consider the process by which all this information had been amassed, ordered, published and argued over -- the massive collaborative effort shared amongst so many contributors, and the exponential benefit such a resource provided.

Over time that initial little moment of wonder grew into a fascination with the culture around shared information - code and designs that can be studied, modified, and redistributed by anyone, for any purpose.