June 4, 2009, 8:34 am
A free lunch may still be a myth, but the benefits of free and open source software are already legendary. Businesses now readily embrace Linux, Apache, and scores of other packages up and down the so-called stack; companies such as MySQL have proven it’s possible to turn an open source project into a (very) profitable enterprise; and services like Dreamhost and WordPress are leading a new wave of businesses powered entirely by community-driven software rather than an impenetrable black tower of proprietary code.
Moreover, some companies are going even further than using open source. Many are contributing code to open source, too, releasing the source of software founded by internal development efforts. In recent years, Google, Yahoo, and even the United States government have become open source contributors. With so many producers and consumers of open source software, websites such as Github have cropped up to serve as, well, hubs…
