Recently, one of my clients was discussing a possible business deal with a relative – who happens to work for a Fortune 500 company in some capacity. Let’s call him “Bob.” The discussion turned at some point to open source software and Bob stated, “Major companies will not do business with anything open source.”
Now, I may be off the mark just a bit on the quote, but I’m pretty close.
I guess Bob hasn’t ever heard of Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Sun, Google, and Amazon just to name a few. Oh yeah, let’s also remember some of the smaller players – such as the Mozilla Foundation. Does Bob think that Google runs on Windows boxes?
What about BIND which powers DNS? Even Apple has been in on the open source game with much of OSX deriving from NetBSD and FreeBSD.
Anyway, let’s just suffice it to say that open source software and applications that run on open source code are alive and well and growing at an exponential rate. This growth is being experienced all the way from large corporations down to small businesses such as mine. Anyone that thinks differently really needs to put down the Kool-Aide.
Open source firm sees growth during slump
http://pacific.bizjournals.com/pacific/othercities/sanfrancisco/stories/2008/12/15/story7.html?b=1229317200^1747088
“The trend was bolstered by Sun Microsystems Inc.’s January purchase of MySQL — an open source database provider in Cupertino focused on internet applications — for $1 billion, according to Yuhanna. That “further validated the open source database market’s worthiness, and enterprises can now expect even more reliability and improved support in the coming years,” he wrote.”
Subject: Amazon and Open Source
http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2004/amazon_0204.html
Open source success due to Microsoft, claims report
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/121908-open-source-success-due-to.html?hpg1=bn
Open Source at Google
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com
Google’s Open Source Android OS Will Free the Wireless Web
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-07/ff_android?currentPage=all
Scalr: The Auto-Scaling Open-Source Amazon EC2 Effort
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/03/scalr-the-auto-scaling-open-source-amazon-ec2-effort
The Growth of Open Source Software in Organizations – Optaros
http://www.cio-weblog.com/50226711/the_growth_of_open_source_software_in_organizations_optaros.php
How two of the world’s largest websites use Linux for high availability
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/21586/1141
The Total Growth of Open Source
http://www.riehle.org/publications/2008/the-total-growth-of-open-source