Commercial Viability

Open source is viable and significant in the commercial Internet and enterprise. You have probably seen the headlines in the business publications about Linux - the most noted success in open source software. The reality of open source goes much deeper. The success of Linux, an open source Unix-like operating system (OS), has been joined by other successes, including the Apache web server and MySQL database. These three products have changed the landscape of the web. If you are reading this article on the A-HEC web site, you are experiencing a web site using all three of these open source products. If you visit our ‘Forums’ area, you will experience a fourth, phpBB, an open source forums package that runs on Apache and MySQL. The Apache MySQL combination (usually running on top of Linux) has spawned a plethora of open source web applications in development and various stages of deployment.

So, what about the market share numbers to prove the commercial success of open source? A very comprehensive summary of quantitative data can be found in an online paper by David A. Wheeler (see http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html) [1]. Some key items from this article that you should be aware of:

- Apache has over three times the market share of its nearest competitor (Microsoft) according to a poll by Netcraft of publicly available web sites - and Apache’s share appears to be growing.

- The operating system competition appears to be evolving into a two horse race between Microsoft (in the lead at about 49% of web serving OSs) and Linux (clear number two at about 29% - way ahead of Sun Solaris at about 7% in a distant third).

- Various studies have touted Apache and Linux as being highly stable, very well supported and less vulnerable to security issues with lower total cost than the proprietary alternatives.

The term open source came into being less than ten-years ago, as a name to encompass variations on liberal source code licensing that had emerged through trial and error beginning with the source code licensing of the Unix operating system from AT&T/Bell Laboratories in the 1970s. To achieve higher productivity (as well as to create a reputation for one’s work) it was fairly common for software developers in the 1980s to create and share various productivity tools and small portions of applications - known at the time by some developers as the emerging field of “software reuse”. But, this does stand in stark contrast to the emergence of open source as a viable market challenger to proprietary software products in major markets. This new development is less than ten years old and may face significant legal and/or business model challenges ahead. However, in our view, especially given the backdrop of the historical anti-trust challenges against Microsoft, it is unlikely that the current trends will be reversed.