On demand, Open Source and Linux

If the movement toward e-business on demand teaches us anything, it is that innovation and openness are indivisible. The recent history of the IT industry also shows that the most effective way to evolve those standards is in a democratic, collaborative community capable of agreeing on standards, implementing them, and evolving them de facto in the light of actual marketplace experience. (The only alternative doctrinaire, de jure imposition of a single monolithic standard is incompatible with the heterogeneity of the modern infrastructure and with the customer's natural interest in choice.)

In fact, the Open Source community contributed the technologies that were used to build much of the Internet itself technologies such as TCP/IP, sendmail, and Apache. But perhaps the most successful technology to emerge from the Open Source community recently has been Linux.

For one thing, Linux is more than just software. It is a movement, a culture peopled by thousands of developers all over the world who constantly refine and improve the code and contribute it back to the community. Because of this open approach, Linux has become a symbol of collaboration and innovation a celebration of the entrepreneurial spirit of the world's software developers.

The result of this uniquely collaborative approach is a truly elegant piece of software that works on any type of computer hardware everything from set top boxes to mainframes, and everything in between. In fact, one could say with confidence that it will even run on computer hardware that has not yet been invented. Customers thus get unprecedented flexibility and freedom of choice.