First manufacturing, next paper peddling, then callcenters and now the outsourcing to India has begun also for writing as CNET's builder.com moves some of its freelance writing budget off shore. The English language is probably the biggest success in open source history. Free to use, free to extend and a worldwide standard for the exchange of information.
English actually replaced another language, Latin, as the market leader because of latin's closed source origin within the catholic church. People didn't really like the terms of use of catholicism so in the 1500's open source alternatives to catholicism started springing up and with them the Latin monopoly for knowledge exchange started splintering. In it's day (which outlasted catholic dominance by hundreds of years) Latin was no less global: Scientific journals were published locally, translated into Latin for distribution across Europe and then republished in the other countries in their local language.

Caveats: (<- see how some parts of Latin lives on even in English. Something for the lawyers to look into)
When I say that Latin was global, I mean of course that it was used all over Europe.
The fact of translation of scientific journals is anecdotal. I need to document that somehow. Watch for updates.