There are some surprising findings. Although Linux is generally assumed to be written by hobbyists, the Linux Foundation is actually funded by some of the biggest names in computing, including IBM, Intel, Hewlett Packard and Hitachi – even Microsoft, long seen as a fierce critic is now in its own words “building bridges with the open source community”.

Big companies like IBM employ hundreds of programmers to work on Linux and they’re in the top three contributors to the project. IBM’s involvement dates from the 1990’s when it realised that another open source project, the Apache “web server” (the free software that runs most websites) was better than their own.

And while Windows still far outnumbers Linux on personal computers, it’s a different story at the other end of the scale – 87% of the world’s top 500 supercomputers run Linux.

But some of the most striking findings are among more conventional businesses that are adopting the open source ethos – of sharing information, putting information into the public domain, openness to non-specialists etc. In fact the Business School at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has for years been studying open source for just that reason.

The most startling example is the gold-mining company Goldcorp which was in the doldrums, with its biggest mine under-performing badly, until the CEO Rob McEwen went to an MIT seminar about Linux. In a “eureka moment” McEwen decided to put all the company’s jealously guarded geological information onto the internet and hold a competition for web users to tell them where to dig next. Over 100 excellent suggestions followed, revealing so much gold that the company valuation rose rapidly from $100 million to $9 billion.

Presented by Gerry Northam, with contributions from IBM, Mozilla, Linux, MIT, McEwen and more, mostly on site in California, Oregon and Toronto – and an expert on ant colonies*. It is a Square Dog Radio production for BBC Radio 4.