Is it Possible to Not Use Open Source?
In the computing industry, open source technologies are well known and sometimes even looked down upon; however, many of these solutions have taken root as industry standards and are as common place as many better known technologies such as Microsoft Office. In this blog, I point out 2 extremely successful open source solutions that the average person interacts with daily without even knowing it.
For example, SQLite is an interesting piece of open source technology that was first developed in 2000 by D. Richard Hipp. SQLite is not a standalone database tool, but rather a set of libraries that are directly called from within an application and allow the user to leverage common database query language using a simple file on the host machine. To put it simply, it gives the programmer a database without the overhead of a database. This nifty piece of technology has reached an incredibly broad group of users as it is currently running on modern smartphones including the Apple iPhone, Google Android, and Symbian OS phone. McAfee uses SQLite in its antivirus programs, Adobe in Photoshop Lightroom and Skype users interact with it on the Mac and Windows clients. A complete list of known companies using the technology is at https://www.sqlite.org/famous.html with many more unknown users as the technology is in the public domain with no license.
Commonly known in the software industry but not well publicized to the general public, Apache HTTP Server Project is the most popular web server on the Internet. A web server is the product that delivers a web site to a browser when requested. For example, when you enter http://www.networkworld.com, a web server receives the request and delivers the content to your browser. Since April 1996, Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet (statistics of Apache usage are available at https://trends.builtwith.com/Server/Apache) with the latest data showing that 63.60% of the top million websites running the Apache HTTP Server. Another tool https://greatstatistics.com/ shows an even higher rate of usage of 70.8% of all web servers running this open source solution. The closest competitor is Microsoft IIS with only 19.67% usage. Clearly, the odds are very high that the websites you visit daily are primarily running on this industry standard web server technology.
As you can see, open source software impacts your life daily and is well established as industry standards in many competitive markets. Are you aware of any other open source technologies that are industry standards? Looking forward to your thoughts on how open source continues to become the default solution of choice.
[Note by Open Source Subnet editor Julie Bort: Original headline was “Open is a Virus” … as calls came out to blame me for the title, in true “open source” fashion, I am bowing to the wisdom of the crowd and I have stepped in and changed it.]
