“Despite a lack of marketing resources, more businesses are
discovering and deploying open-source software in their back
offices. Support has improved, and capable tools quickly become the
standard by which commercial products are measured.”
“With little or no marketing budget, open-source software is
finding its way into the back offices of the the largest companies
and is powering some of the highest-bandwidth Web sites on the
Internet.”
“Not only does open-source software rarely have the benefit of
professional marketing, but companies that do deploy it in their
infrastructures often hesitate to admit it. Security concerns are
one reason, but, also, developers in IT departments often use open
source without the knowledge of higher-level management. The result
is a general lack of dialogue, both inside and outside businesses,
about the use and effectiveness of open-source software.”
“The most ubiquitous and well-known open-source software–the
Apache Web server, the Perl scripting language, the Sendmail
message transport agent, the Linux operating system, and the Gnu C
Compiler, already command dominant market shares in their
respective categories for many classes of business applications.
While Linux has had a well-funded marketing push in the past year
or so, other products have spread to IT departments by word of
mouth or because no better alternatives existed.”