I was reading Slashdot this morning and ran across a link to a story about the Internet instability last week caused by minor bugs in two routers that propagated across the planet in something like 30 seconds. While the story itself is interesting (a good read if you're into how poor software implementation can lead to very strange problems on a network), it was the author's summary of the situation that is both humorous and dead on accurate:

The happy ending to this story is that the community quickly rallied and worked together to both identify and mitigate the problem. No meetings were held, no bailouts were requested and not a single lawyer was needed to draft an agreement. The Internet was back to normal in short order.

Earl Zmijewski, renesys.com

If you ever need to wonder why things like open source and open protocols are better for the world than company owned proprietary solutions, you need to see how this problem was solved.