In technology, open-source environments have been one of the most important organizational models in the last 30 years. Perhaps the most successful of these has been the Linux operating system. Linux was born in a world of proprietary operating systems (remember OS2, Sun OS, and others?). Operating systems provide the interface between hardware developers and application software developers. Proprietary operating systems have difficulty providing all the functionality required by both communities at a rate required for rapid progress.
In 1991, Linux was introduced as an open source platform and soon grew in popularity. Today, Linux has significant market share in the commercial landscape, and in fact, the Linux ecosystem is larger than anything any single company or even country can build. The seminal moment occurred in 2000 when IBM announced its full support of Linux effectively deemphasizing the path of their own proprietary operating systems. Android, WordPress, Apache and countless other open-source environments show the viability of this organizational model.
[Source: Forbes]
