Open Source Business Conference

The open-source industry will in the near future reach another milestone when Linux celebrates its 20th anniversary on 25 August. Advocates identify five misconceptions surrounding the innovation and discuss how these have since been proven false with the emergence of a viable business model.

Myth 1: open source is not ready for the "big time"According to Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, vice president and general manager at Red Hat Asia-Pacific, the origins of open source resulted in the research being associated with software that was "cobbled at the same time by amateurs and hobbyists". In turn, this allowed the myth that open source was unsuitable for use in corporate settings to perpetuate.

Global company that had showed support for open source

She cited Virgin Airlines as a global company that had showed support for open source, saying at this year's Open Source Business Conference that the majority of the airline's IT systems were open source and that the airline clocked 100 per cent uptime for all of these systems.

"Many of the Microsoft Server OS's vulnerabilities came out while the emergence of the cloud infrastructure," she pointed out. Comparatively, Linux systems withstood the impact of exposure to the open internet, she noted, which was why cloud computing vendors today base their technical stacks primarily on open-source technologies.

Myth 4: open source is all about infrastructureTretikov noted that because open-source technologies first emerged at the systems level, and subsequently went on to be used heavily to support cloud infrastructure services and platforms, people tended to think open-source applications were only used at this level of the computing stack.

Earlier, experts agreed that open-source projects have been mushrooming across the computing stack. Charles Zedlewski, vice president for product at Cloudera, as well noted that OSS tended to be "most successful in broad, horizontal software categories".

Companies, too, are now working with open-source developers to come up with products that would boost their businesses, he noted. Singapore's taxi operator ComforDelGro, for instance, developed its SMS taxi booking system on the company's JBoss Seam application server to help reduce customer waiting time and improve overall user experience, van Leeuwen said.

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