Open source arrival in IT ecosystem
"Linux is a cancer", CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer, 2001.
The relation between the software industry and open source has changed in more than twenty years, and the welcome was not always very warm. Software developers aren't homogeneous group, various kind of interest coexists, people in universities, army, companies or hobbyist have different goals and constraints. There is a lot of conflict around software.
One emblematic actors of this conflict was Microsoft. They saw in open source a real threat to their business, and decided to fought against it. At the beginning of 2000's, "The Halloween Documents" were leaked by Eric Raymond, revealing internal document from the company, showing the point of view of some key actors. Seeing Linux and open source concept in general as something to consider actively: "a lot more thought/discussion needs to put into Microsoft's response to the OSS phenomena". Open source being widely available and reliable, usable for servers, for free ! They were noticing some other famous open source to watch like Apache, Gimp, Perl or Sendmail.
The paper was suggesting to "de-commoditize protocols & applications", even being against open standards. It was an annoying period for Microsoft.
It was an ideological battle between proprietary VS free and open source software that will last for years.
Nowadays, a lot of events & factors changed the situation. One movement is on the way to change the other side.
Place of Free and Open Source Software today
What does represent free and open source nowadays ?
The open source movement provide strong tools with a massive collaboration of highly skilled people, and freely available which make them highly pervasive : open source is viral !
Some statistics :
- All top 500 supercomputer are under Linux since 2017
- 85% of mobile phone use Linux, through Android mainly
- 96.3% of the top 1 million web servers are running Linux
- 90% of the cloud is powered by Linux
- Apache & nginx represents 60% of webservers
- Linux is on Mars inside Ingenuity, a Perseverance portable helicopter. It's used in ISS computers.
- 90% of IT leaders are using open source, Red Hat report with 80% expecting an increase.
- From the same report, 87% are seeing open source as more secure or as secure as proprietary software.
The IT ecosystem is using intensively open source every day, it's ubiquitous. Interacting with Internet mean using open source. Simple example : programming languages ! The foundation of almost all software is open source, with some extremely rare exceptions. Compilers for C, C++, C# languages, php, javascript, python, java... Open source is everywhere in IT.
So companies are adopting it too, a lot of them are involved. All Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft (GAFAM) & Baidu/Alibaba/Tencent/Xiaomi (BATX) are producing, using or hosting some open source software. Twitter released the CSS & JS framework Bootstrap. Linux Kernel contributors include some actors like Samsung, Huawei, IBM, Intel... Microsoft is ranked as the first contributor of open source code on GitHub in 2021, the company changed her mind during 2010s, they even allow Linux to run on Windows !
The adoption is rising for corporate, their contribution too.
Open source is here to stay.
Free and Open Source Software in public institutions
Safer, customizable, reusable, for sovereignty reasons, states worldwide are also adopting open source for public administration. Using a lot of proprietary software by the end of 2000, countries are now considering seriously FOSS. Regularly, new policies are moving forward to use it more and to incite administration to publish code.
The US White House Director of Technology, under Biden & Obama administration, is David Recordon, an open source actor and important developer of OpenID and OAuth. A study from the European Commission claimed that "by procuring OSS instead of proprietary software, the public sector could not only reduce the total cost of ownership but could also reduce or prevent vendor lock-in". For schools, for the health system, the police, army... On all continents. Brazil, India, South Africa, Switzerland, Russia... Even North Korea adopted Linux !
Public institutions are following the movement, increasing open source acceptation.
Article from a series for the project Open Source Education to give pedagogical content during the Hacktoberfest.
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