Courtesy of OSWeekly.com

(Column) - The open source revolution has shaken the slowly crumbling foundations of closed source software, and while it hasn't taken over completely just yet, the tide is beginning to turn in its favor. Your normal everyday user may not really understand or appreciate what open source means, but that doesn't mean that they're not experiencing the effects of it. One person's vision can literally be transformed into a worldwide project with an international development team working all hours of the day to make improvements on the software that they love. This passion is a strong motivating factor, and the results speak for themselves. Just look at the success of Firefox for an indication of this.

To this day, when I think about open source, I instantly think about Linux. That operating system was one of the first things that I remember to be actively promoted as being open source. It's for the people, by the people. There's something to be said for this type of a group effort. When you go from using something to helping to create it, you can almost begin to develop a relationship with the item being manipulated.

Linux continues to get a big gold star for its ongoing efforts in this area, but don't think that the other OS manufacturers are ignoring the momentum that open source has built for itself. They may not be doing as good of a job with it just yet, but they're learning (sometimes reluctantly) how to deal with this new reality. If you want to make a geek laugh, all you really need to do is mention Microsoft and open source in the same sentence. The chortles will begin to flow freely if you do this correctly.

They've begun to make some first steps with their Shared Source Initiative, but this is a case where the past has come back to bite them because most people are still familiar with the strong stance that Microsoft previously took against open source. No matter how hard they may have tried to wish it away, it's here to stay, and they're forced to adapt to some extent. I don't think it's reasonable to expect that we'll ever see a fully open source version of Windows, but there are smaller things that can be done, and they're beginning to make an effort.

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