The Commercial Bear Hug Of Open Source
While there is never any shortage of hope in the world of technology, perhaps the largest gusher in the last 20 years came from two words: open source, a term that is too large for one column (too big for most books, in fact).
This week JargonSpy takes a trip back in time to understand how many of the hopes and dreams for open source ended up creating a world just like the one we always had. To reduce the scope of our discussion to a digestible size, we must add a qualifier, so this week we are going to look at “commercial open source.”
At first glance, the words “commercial open source” seem like a contradiction in terms. Isn’t open source a community-based movement that was set to overtake the world of commercial software? Wasn’t the famous LAMP stack, Linux, Apache (nyse: APA – news – people ), MySQL and Perl, Python and PHP going to open a world in which software existed outside the traditional realm of property? You know, free–not like free beer, but like free speech?
The Commercial Bear Hug Of Open Source | Forbes.com
Popularity: 6% [?]