OSCON 2012: Open source has won and gone mainstream

Roger Magoulas | O'Reilley Radar | July 30, 2012

Open source won. It’s not that an enemy has been vanquished or that proprietary software is dead, there’s not much regarding adopting open source to argue about anymore. After more than a decade of the low-cost, lean startup culture successfully developing on open source tools, it’s clearly a legitimate, mainstream option for technology tools and innovation.

And open source is not just for hackers and startups. A new class of innovative, widely adopted technologies has emerged from the open source culture of collaboration and sharing — turning the old model of replicating proprietary software as open source projects on its head. Think GitHub, D3, Storm, Node.js, Rails, Mongo, Mesos or Spark.