“During the coming year, we believe the IT industry will
experience a major inflection point, with the open-source movement
serving as a primary catalyst for the change.“
“Open-source projects are taking the world by storm. For
instance, International Data Corporation recently indicated that
Linux operating system shipments grew by 93 percent in 1999, giving
Linux a 25 percent market share, second only to Microsoft (Nasdaq:
MSFT)’s Windows NT. Linux also had a higher market share than all
flavors of Unix combined. Linux is growing rapidly because it is
relatively inexpensive, very reliable, and evolving rapidly,
particularly compared to Windows NT. In a traditional proprietary
software model, a limited number of people design and develop the
software, and new product releases are infrequent at best. With
open source, thousands of developers participate in software
development across the globe; bug fixes and product enhancements
occur daily.”
“It is important to differentiate between Linux and open source,
which are frequently used as synonymous terms. Open source is an
innovative way to develop software, whereby the source code — the
basic set of instructions for the program — is available to be
freely reviewed, modified, and redistributed by the general public.
Instead of a single organization creating the software code,
open-source software is developed across many different
organizations, academic institutions, and even international
boundaries. Linux, which is the most visible and successful
open-source project to date, is an operating system like Microsoft
Windows or Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW)’s Solaris, and it is
available to download for free over the Internet. Unlike
closed-source software, for which vendors charge for each copy in
use, anybody can copy Linux, use it, modify it, distribute it, or
sell it.”