Systems are becoming complex
The first open source technology was mostly self-contained OS and database software residing on single servers. A user downloaded MySQL to a server and managed it locally. Now, with the near-ubiquity of broadband and the cloud, open source platforms are becoming vast multi-node systems. Startups today can take advantage of low-cost distributed computing to build and release sophisticated open source software. They can use the cloud for easy distribution, control and updates. A cloud-based distributed model enables open source technologies to scale to new heights. Yahoo now runs Hadoop across 40,000 servers to manage its massively complex distributed-data system. This type of massive-scale open source deployment was unthinkable 10 years ago.