Apple, Microsoft, VMware: Everyone's Building Open-Source Software

In the opening keynote at LinuxCon, Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin observed that open source is now key to how all companies use to develop software—and yes he meant Apple, Microsoft, and VMware as well.

At LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation's annual North American technical conference, Jim Zemlin's, the Foundation's executive director said, “If you are going to master software development, you must master open source.”

Why is it important for businesses to master open source? Zemlin said it's because “Software is the future of IT. Hardware is important to enable software, but what I mean that the value that end-users sees from technology increasingly comes from the software.”

He then showed a slide of half-a-dozen smartphones that were turned off and pointed out that even with a very technical crowd, “If you just look at the hardware of smartphones, you can't tell them apart, it's only when you turn them on that you can tell the differences.”