LinuxQuestions.org - Closed Source Enterprise Soon to be a Thing of the Past

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Opensource.com has an interview with developer, writer, and entrepreneur Andy Hunt. Andy has been in the business for a long time, and has seen the evolution of software through the years. According to him, proprietary software in the datacenter and enterprise desktops has had its day, and is on its way out.

My experience suggests that Andy is right, although it is important to recognize that not everyone agrees. I have spoken with many sysadmins who still swear by Windows servers, and many more who swear by one proprietary Unix system or another. However, it is also worth taking those opinions with a grain of salt, it is almost impossible to convince a person of something when their job depends on them not understanding it.

The old, proprietary operating system companies all died. Closed source programming languages are mostly dead. Open source isn’t a novelty anymore, it’s just a big part of how software is.

While many of the older companies are no longer around, Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Oracle are still very big players in the enterprise market. They may not be dead yet, but they are certainly feeling the squeeze as more and more companies move to cloud hosting or open source infrastructure. While it is good to celebrate the successes that open source has had over the years, it is also prudent to not underestimate the work that is still ahead. Linux is winning, pure and simple, against big iron Unix, but I rarely run into a company that is not running at least some Microsoft servers for internal use.

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--jeremy