There was a time when the open-source software movement was considered a little too risqué for the established order of the multibillion-dollar IT industry. Buttoned down, conservative IT buyers could never be fired for forking out excessive fees on software licences, because it was considered good practice.
Open source was a community of software developers who collaborated on building programmes and sharing their creations openly and freely on the internet, leaving the source code open to be tweaked or improved. Rather than charging licence fees, creators built businesses around providing services like maintenance and security, thereby enabling them to undercut major IT giants like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.