“Vendors are increasingly using publicly available software to
build commercial products or are developing products, and in the
spirit of open source, giving them away. The upshot for customers
is that these products are often less expensive than their
counterparts, and because they are built on open source, they gain
from the collective development smarts of the open source
community. In addition, they can be altered as users see fit.”
“Forrester Research says companies are overcoming fears of
relying on open source products in their networks. The research
firm estimates that more than 55% of the world’s 2,500 biggest
firms use open source software, with almost a quarter using the
software in production systems….”
“But small vendors aren’t the only ones rallying around open
source technologies. Plenty of big companies, IBM and Sun for
instance, have thrown their weight behind technologies such as
Linux and Apache. They are also adopting the open source model in a
broader sense.”