Linux was born in the early 1990s but the term "open source" wasn't coined until 1998. And over the past ten years the open source development model has steadily gained momentum. Today, many commercial sponsors of open source project have seen the value of their projects rise in the marketplace.
Acquisitions of companies based on open source projects include: JBoss, which was acquired by Red Hat ($350M). SiteScape, which was acquired by Novell (undisclosed). Scalix, which was acquired by Xandros (undisclosed). Zimbra, which was acquired by Yahoo! ($350M). Xensource, which was acquired by Citrix ($500M). MySQL, which was acquired by Sun ($1B). The fact that large sums of money are being spent to acquire the commercial sponsors of open source projects is proof that software development momentum is shifting to open source and away from proprietary software development.
A movement as powerful as open source was destined to reach high levels of value and interest. The open source model is world-wide and brings together the talents of many developers who work on a project not because they want to get rich, but because they want to do it. In other words, they have found an "itch" that they want to scratch. Open source software by its very nature can be fixed or modified by anyone with the skill to do it. See something wrong...fix it. Want to add some feature to a project...submit it. Want to take a project in another direction...fork it. Open source is about the freedom to freely use software that is valuable to you.
Closed source or proprietary software development typically serves corporate interests, which are usually motivated by profit. Closed source software is about keeping the source code secret and making you pay for a license to use it. You cannot take it apart. You cannot fix it. You cannot copy it and you cannot give it away to someone else.
So far the acquisition of commercial sponsors of open source projects has been made by companies committed to open source software development. But the big bucks exchanged for some of these high profile project sponsors has generated concern among the purists. Should we be worried that this is happening? Probably not too much because even if the commercial project sponsor ceases business operations, the maintainers and contributors of the project can organize themselves to continue the project on their own or fork it if they decide to take a different direction.
Open source projects cannot be "orphaned" unless everyone involved with the project stops working on it. With over 130,000 open source projects registered on SourceForge.net you can bet there are a lot of projects that have received very little attention for years, but there they are waiting for someone who wants to continue scratching the "itch" that got the project going in the first place. You can't say the same thing about proprietary software where products can be abandoned leaving users with no legal access to the program source code.
When it comes to selecting software for your organization, it is now important to weigh the value of choosing open source software. After all, which software development model offers you more freedom and security? The correct answer is open source.
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