Eric S. Raymond's article "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is considered to be a seminal text in the Open Source Movement asserting the superiority of open-sourced software and making the now famous claim that 'given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’.  This paper is said to have played an important role in Netscape's decision to release the source code of its popular Internet browser.

With regards to the relative cheapness of open source software compared to traditionally developed software, see What's Gnu? Gnu's Not Unix" in which Richard Stallman states his purpose in founding the Free Software Foundation, which instituionalized the Open Source Movement, as the creation of high quality and essentially free software in order to prevent the software industry becoming dominated by a few powerful companies.