I had lunch with a company's IT staff yesterday, and asked them,
"Which open source projects/products do you use?" They listed off
several projects (Tomcat, etc.), but I had to prompt for the most
obvious one: "And Linux? I assume you're running Linux?"
"Linux? Oh, of course, I guess we had forgotten that's open
source."
This was a hugely telling remark. For this company (and, frankly,
for most of the industry), "open source" is short-hand for many
things, and sometimes connotes a cutting-edge, not fully baked
product. This is accurate in some respects, and wholly inaccurate
in others (no one could sanely call Apache, MySQL, etc. "not
fully baked").
In this company's mind, Linux is just there. It works, requires
no special justification, etc. It just is.
Give JBoss and MySQL a year or two, and they'll be the same.
Along with hordes of other open source projects.
For those of you who, like I, have been …
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