GitHub and Open Source growth continues to skyrocket

The meteoric growth of GitHub, some say, points to the vibrancy of the open source world in technology right now. Once seen as a series of pet projects, now open source is not just big money for big businesses -- Red Hat is the first billion-dollar open source company -- but it has gained the credibility of enterprises, causing what some call a shift in attitudes toward open source, both by business leaders and developers.

Alan Shimel, co-founder and managing partner at The CISO Group and a Network World blogger, says he sees a "second golden age" of open source right now. A first burst, driven by Linux, MySQL and other technologies broke open source on to the enterprise radar in the 1990s. Now, open source projects have just exploded -- from Android to OpenStack, Hadoop, MongoBD and others. "There's this second batch of monster, huge open source projects," he says.