Microsoft. Sun. Bitter enemies with only one thing in common — their hatred for each other. Until recently, that is. Lately they have come to share something else: a fear of Linux. And they are not alone. Throughout the software industry, companies of all shapes and sizes have been asking themselves, “How will the open source movement affect our business?” Or, “Can we embrace open source without destroying our traditional businesses at the same time?”
Pondering these questions is causing the fear level to rise at every software company whose profits depend on the proprietary closed source revenue model. They are having difficulty adjusting to the open source paradigm for the creation and distribution of software. The Linux OS represents the ultimate manifestation of this movement.
What many people seem to be overlooking in the middle of all the hype is that open source is not really a new paradigm at all. It has been around for at least as long as all of the companies that now fear it. This begs an interesting question: if open source has been around all this time, how come it is only now becoming a threat to the entrenched players in the software industry?
To answer this question, we first need to briefly explore the history of the open source movement, and look at some of the differences in the underlying economic philosophies of the open and closed software camps.
Closed source software relies upon the economic principle of scarcity. If…
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