Almost 2 years ago, in How Open Do You Have To Be To Be Open Source? I wrote:Google and Yahoo! are not rich because they have secrets. They are rich because they started with secrets, but I believe they could safely let their secrets out with very little loss of revenue.Matt Asay’s recent post Google’s slow transformation into an open, transparent company made me dig up that post, which by many standards is old in terms of time, but it’s only now that some of this change is actually happening.Matt ponders,It remains to be seen what, if anything, Google will actually open, but I trust its track record on living up to its word more than Microsoft’s, which also went through a flurry of “We’re now really open!” announcements lately that actually netted the industry…not much.In interesting news, at last night’s Boston Sun/MySQL event (more on that in another post), the question was asked if the panel thought that Microsoft was really serious about open sourcing their software(s) and what that would mean for open source software.I couldn’t wait to jump in with my answer — and even though I had to wait, I did eventually say what was on my mind.If Microsoft opened all of their code tomorrow, how big of a *developer* community would they have? By that I mean, how many people would say “yeah, all right! I’m going to make this code better!” and how many would take a look at the internals and feel like they’d just been on a roller coaster?Open source is the foundation of civilization. The title of this post mentions that, and now I will explain why.