“Many programmers are holding out for the day when ebusinesses
can run using only open source products. A new standard may end the
waiting.”
“There has been much ballyhoo in the last couple of years over
the open source movement, with many media outlets treating it as a
new phenomenon. The Internet itself, however, is built on open
source software. From TCP/IP to the Perl scripting language and the
popular email server Sendmail, most of the Net’s core technologies
are public domain, open source products. Citing that fact, some
programmers and software developers now argue that Internet
business technologies will follow the same evolutionary path. How
long will it be, they wonder, before an Internet business can be
built and run using only open source software?”
“Some numbers would lead you to believe that time is right
around the corner. Bolstered by high-profile company adoption,
Linux is expected soon to outpace all competitors (except Windows),
expanding its market share by 25 percent annually, according to
IDC. At the same time, the open source Apache Webserver now helps
run 60 percent of the Websites on the Internet, according to
Netcraft. Despite the gains made by these specific open source
products, most analysts and programmers contend that it’s not yet
feasible to build a company’s entire business platform on open
source software. Some also argue that recent announcements in
software development call into question whether source code will
even be relevant in the future.“