Tim O'Rielly has posted an excellent essay in which he examines the open source phenomenon using Thomas Kuhn's "paradigm shift" mental model. With excellent references (not to mention links to related O'Rielly books), Paradigm Shift covers the commoditization of software, internet collaboration, and the software as an evolving service concept.

In short, if it is sufficiently robust an innovation to qualify as a new paradigm, the open source story is far from over, and its lessons far from completely understood. Rather than thinking of open source only as a set of software licenses and associated software development practices, we do better to think of it as a field of scientific and economic inquiry, one with many historical precedents, and part of a broader social and economic story. Source