“These are the top 10 events, personalities and companies
that pushed the Internet into the mainstream of IT organizations
and business processes in the past decade. From Tim
Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web, to more
marketing-driven events such as America Online’s gutsy decision to
offer unlimited flat-rate access, to the ignominy of major
e-business outages, the events that follow shaped the commercial
Internet and convinced corporate IT managers once and for all that
the Internet was for real. Given the pace of Internet time, the
events cannot quite be thought of as a trip down memory lane, but
we hope you enjoy recalling them nonetheless….”
“The Internet also became the means for a new model of how
software is created. The open, shared development of code produced
some of the key underlying technology of the Internet, such as the
Apache Web server and the sendmail message transfer agent, but it
is the Linux operating system that has carried the torch for the
open-source movement. Beginning with graduate student Linus
Torvalds’ first postings of code in August 1991, Linux has provided
a free and reliable Unix-type operating system that made many early
Internet services possible….”
“The real, long-term significance is that it gives us some hope
of solving the software quality problem,” said open-source advocate
Eric Raymond. “I wouldn’t claim that open source is in itself a
total solution to that problem, but it’s now clear that the way
forward lies through open source and not around it.”