(Pixabay)
Cloud services are the great disruptor of both IT organizations and vendors, and wrapping open source software around a service is the latest flashpoint.
The open source development model has proven to be an incredible incubator of innovative software by democratizing and distributing the conception, design, implementation and debugging of new titles, advantages that were thoroughly explored more than two decades ago in the book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Although open source has since been adopted, encouraged and sponsored by every major software company, its origins were decidedly non-commercial with utopian overtones of liberating code from the tyranny of proprietary shackles. The earliest open source projects, notably Gnu Emacs and other tools from the Gnu Project, embraced this idealistic ethos with a restrictive, comprehensive license, GPL, that applies to derivative work using the code.