Computerworld Australia: Blazing Trails with Open Source

"It's often said that open source doesn't innovate. It imitates. That's certainly what the proprietary software industry would have you believe. And to look at the activity in some of the most prominent open source projects in use in enterprises today, it's tempting to agree.

"For example, although open source databases are incredibly popular for all kinds of mission-critical applications, neither MySQL or PostgreSQL is really doing anything that IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sybase haven't been doing for years. Similarly, the OpenOffice.org productivity suite is an impressive example of community-driven development, and yet it's only real purpose is to create a free, standards-based clone of Microsoft Office. Even Linux itself is an attempt to rewrite Unix as free software..."

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