It was as if the town's smile had lost a tooth when the church in the center of tiny Lincoln, Vt., burned down in the early 1980s. But townspeople found the money and resolve to move an abandoned church up the road to the site.

I was living in Lincoln at the time. I'll always remember the spirit that drove people, whether church-goers or not, to volunteer time and dollars to solve a problem that was affecting the community -- and I'll especially remember the pride we all felt one summer day as we watched the replacement church being trundled down the country road to its new foundation.

That spirit, it seems to me, is part of what fuels the open-source software movement and its close relative, free software. With open source, the programming instructions (source code) are openly available for anyone to use and modify, with the general proviso that improvements are returned to the overall community.

Open source software runs at the core of the Internet, which would not be what it is today without the contributions of countless volunteers. Open source is one of the last remaining constraints on monopolists like Microsoft, and offers alternatives in an increasingly monocultural environment.

And as technology people gather this week for the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in San Diego, it's worth noting what open source has in common with barn raisings and church movings. They are about volunteer effort and community. They defy conventional notions of property and economics. Their value is enormous.

But open source threatens vested interests. Could it be in jeopardy?

In the mean-spirited sphere of so-called ``intellectual property,'' open source is a cancer that must be excised, not a community resource to be applauded. Barn raisings are unacceptable in a world where contractors have cornered the market for putting up commercial buildings.

The word ``cancer'' in this context was uttered by none other than Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, not coincidentally the company most threatened by open source. Ballmer has since semi-retracted that language, saying he was referring only to specific licensing terms. Yet words from others at Microsoft, and some actions, indicate continuing ill will.

A year ago at the O'Reilly Open Source gathering, a senior Microsoft executive, Craig Mundie, strongly suggested that the company would use its growing portfolio of patents against open source developers. The threat was a clear warning, and a provocative one from a company that hadn't been shy about launching its public relations team against some open source software, notably the Linux operating system.

More recently, Microsoft has made tentative moves toward coexistence. Among other things, it started a so-called ``shared source'' initiative, in which certain people may look at Windows source code under restricted conditions. This may fall under the category of having one's cake and eating it, but it recognizes the value of community feedback.

A Microsoft shared-source program manager, speaking at a recent Internet law program at Harvard University, was asked several times if Microsoft would follow through on Mundie's patent threats. The lack of a response was, in its own way, revealing.

In recent weeks, Microsoft has launched its ``Palladium'' initiative, a hardware-software system designed to make computing more secure from viruses and malevolent hackers. Palladium, unfortunately, could also be used by intellectual-property owners to lock down copyrighted materials in ways that would damage users' rights. Critics have also suggested that Palladium could be used to freeze out open source software -- and they make a compelling case.

If the forces of control do manage to twist technology and the law to make life more difficult for open source, they will do a lot of damage. But such efforts may ultimately be futile, and not just in the software business.

Open source may, in fact, be a model for a radical shift in the way we do things. Yochai Benkler, professor of law at New York University and a longtime observer of information technology's relationship to our lives, says open source signals ``a broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment.''

In an upcoming article (www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html) for the Yale Law Journal, he calls it `` `commons-based peer-production,' to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.''

This is optimistic thinking. But if Benkler is right, we're on the verge of bringing some of our best instincts to the forefront of our lives.

Barn raising, anyone?