CIO: The End of Idealism

“The concept of software as a public good wasn’t invented by
Linus (that honor probably goes to Richard Stallman with the
publication of the GNU Manifesto in 1985), nor was Linux the first
open-source Unix (that would be Minix, developed by Andrew
Tanenbaum in 1987). However, the creation of a practical and
effective process by which source code is shared on a noncommercial
basis essentially came from his efforts. It’s also clear that his
willingness to maintain the essence of the open-source process
through his active participation has been critical in expanding and
maintaining the community.

“Fast-forward to 2001. Linux is in the core strategy of most
major vendors (including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Oracle and
Sun Microsystems) and is increasingly the platform of choice for
many server applications. Open-source development products (JBoss,
FreeSQL, Tomcat) are widely available and in some cases (such as
Apache) widely used. There are at least 30 Linux distributions
available. Microsoft is even acting as though it’s at least mildly
concerned.

“So has open source come of age? Are we beyond the idealist and
early adopter stage? Should corporate users be looking seriously at
open-source processes and products alongside vendor-owned
solutions? First some issues to consider…”

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