[ Thanks to Carlos for this link.
]
This column maintains that despite the adoration of the
alterna-crowd, open source software is picking up momentum in
corporations: “the pierced, tattoo[ed] crowd has been a little bit
taboo to the buttoned-down IT manager. Now the open source tools
have gotten so powerful, they have spilled over into traditional
IT,” said Darin Andersen, president of Ready Set Net, a Web site
building firm that frequently uses open source code.”
…Sure, plenty of reservations linger. With one or two
exceptions, open source code continues to be held at arm’s length
by information technology (IT) managers who believe it’s fine on
their Web or domain name servers, but they don’t let it get too
much of a foot in the corporate door.After all, they ask, if it’s developed on a volunteer basis,
it’s free and support depends on an appeal to an invisible crowd,
then how can it be any good?But more and more enterprises are proving that it is just as
good as, or better than, commercial code. And that despite the
traditions and culture clashes between the open source community
and commercial enterprise, there’s an increasing need for merging
the best of both worlds and running a mix of the two.