Impact of free and open source software to education and other industries

Since the second half of 1999 Open Source Software in general, and the Linux operating system in particular, has seldom been out of the press. In November 1999 a Microsoft paper (the “Halloween memo”) on Open Source was leaked which showed that Microsoft viewed the Open Source phenomenon as a major threat to their business. At the time that Open Source started hitting the headlines in 1999, it was already being used to run a significant part of the infrastructure of the Internet. 

Since then there has been a sustained growth in the role of Open Source software in the IT industry: 

• Almost all of the major enterprise software vendors sell versions of their software on Linux; 

• Almost all of the major computer vendors sell their computers with Linux preinstalled;  

• Linux is a strategic operating system for many of the large computer vendors (e.g. IBM, HP and SGI); 

• Linux is the fastest growing server operating system; 

• Linux is taking a major part of the operating system market for consumer computing devices; 

• The OSS Apache is the dominant Web server product;

• A number of Open Source projects are starting to have a major impact on the market – e.g. the GIMP (image manipulation), SAMBA (Microsoft file and print services), many program development tools (Perl, Python, emacs etc.), and Postgres and MySQL (databases); 

• New, potentially significant, Open Source projects are springing up everywhere.

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