IT Observer - Open Source: Get With the Program

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Open Source: Get With the Program
Monday, 19 July 2004, 11:25 GMT

Open Source is changing the software industry. It will change it forever. There is no going back. Let's consider some statistics. A number of Open Source products are market leaders: Apache is the leading Web Server (Netcraft shows it having about 70% of market). Sendmail is the leading email server (a survey done in Oct 2001 showed Sendmail at 42% followed by Microsoft Exchange at 18% and Unix qmail at 17%). BIND is the dominant DNS product, servicing over 70% of all Internet domains. PHP is the leading Server-side Scripting Language. (in June 2002, PHP surpassed Microsoft's ASP, used by over 24% of the sites on the Internet). OpenSSH is the Internet's leading implementation of the SSH security protocol with 66.8% of the market. And of course there is Linux which is gradually becoming the dominant server OS.

These products are interesting in terms of the kind of products that they are. They are, by and large, software components that are commodities, or at least commodity-like. The simple law of economics tells us that when a product becomes a mass market commodity, the lowest cost producer ends up dominating the market. Open Source is, if nothing else, the least expensive way of building robust software. This has been proved many times now, and it is thus a slam dunk that Open Source will dominate commodity software.

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