“The technical advances over the last 15 years have been
extraordinary. After much debate, PC Week Labs chose the 15 most
influential technologies–the foundation for revolutionary
products.”
“Open source”
“Frustrated by expensive sealed-box software that didn’t work as
advertised, the IT community in the mid-1990s began experimenting
with the open-source model of software development, gaining the
rights to tinker with system internals. While Microsoft Corp. tried
to figure out its Web strategy and Solaris proved too expensive for
shoestring IS budgets and then-nonexistent Internet budgets,
companies began deploying open-source Apache Web servers, which
often sat on top of the freeware Linux. As software systems become
even more complicated, the open-source model will be the most
efficient development model, allowing technologists to act as a
community of developers who have some control over the machines
that they use, not the other way around.”