The Rise and Rise of Open Source Software: Part II

by Tom Welsh

In the first part of this two-part Update (see Vol. 6, No. 10), I noted the booming popularity of open source software (OSS) and pointed out how many useful and reliable OSS packages now exist. Now I would like to draw attention to the sheer productivity of the leading OSS communities and the enormous energy with which they keep undertaking new projects. As a result, there is already a huge, and rapidly growing, stock of OSS applications and tools. This is not widely understood in the IT industry at large, where many probably still think of OSS as comprising little more than Linux, Apache, MySQL, Firefox, and a few quirky programming languages like Perl and PHP.

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The Rise and Rise of Open Source Software: Part IIThu Dec 15 10:36:28 CST 2005