But, at the risk of deviating from the article contents I do have a great reason why they should. It's simple -- as someone who I can't recall said, “If libraries were invented today, they'd be declared illegal and shut down.” We seem to be perpetually moving towards a world where you don't own any content, you have to perpetually license it to consume it; and the company that really owns it can take it away if you can't pay the monthly subscription, or have the wrong name, or happen to travel to another country.

Libraries and open source are alike in that both have shown that you can make a model different from the standard “produce this year's widgets / buy this year's widgets” actually work. Libraries buy and discard millions of books per year, and ensure that anyone, regardless of their financial standing has access to literature. Similarly, Open Source has ensured that you don't necessarily have to pay massive sums to Microsoft or Apple or their ilk and comply with their ridiculously restrictive policies in order to run software on the computing hardware you own.

Perhaps a bit tenuous, but I think this is a good enough argument that libraries should know about, and possibly promote an interest in Open Source.