BlogHop

Open Source was not an idea decreed from the top. The open Source movement is a genuine grass roots revolution. While evangelists like Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens have had a great success changing the language around free software, that change would have been impossible if the conditions were not light. We have reached the stage where an entire generation of students who learned computer science under the influence of GNU is now at work in industry, and have quietly been bringing free software in through the back doors of industry of years. They do so not from altruistic motives, but rather to bring better code to their work. The revolutionaries are in place. They are the network engineers, system administrators, and programmers who have thrived on open-source software throughout their education, and want to use open-source software to thrive professionally as well. Free software has become a vital part of many companies, often unwittingly, but in some cases quite deliberately. Open Source has come of age: there is such a thing as an Open Source business model. Bob Young’s company, Red Hat Software, Inc., thrives on giving away its core product: Red Hat Linux. One good way to deliver free software is to package it as a full featured distribution with a nice manual. Young is primarily selling convenience, as most do not want to have to bother with downloading all the pieces that make up a full-featured Linux system.