Articles tagged ‘commoditization’

Google, the world's smartest search engine company, is on the eve of going public and Wall Street is going googlemanic. Google could not have done it without top technology, user loyalty, good profits and infrastructure powered by Open Source.

The philosophy and practice of collaboration in open source software forms a win-win model for developers, vendors and users alike. Fundamental economic drivers are changing the nature of competition in the software industry. The competitive landscape is transforming from a few high peaks where monopoly product vendors dominate the market to a more varied terrain of participants collaborating on basic technologies and tools while competing on value-added services.

Governments are choosing Open Source Software (OSS) to encourage competition while keeping costs low and quality high - so let’s examine what OSS is all about.

A decade ago, the Beowulf project revolutionized High Performance Computing (HPC). At that time, the strategy of every high performance computing vendor was to pump up and protect the astronomical prices charged for each gain in perceived performance. Fortunately, Moore’s law works in just the opposite way: greater performance means lower cost. This paradox has everything to do with manufacturers like Intel and AMD being able to make denser and better circuits at cheaper and cheaper costs. It is this commoditization of hardware that drives HPC today.

Linux carries a similar promise for the global software community as the 1849 Gold Rush did for California. For software products and projects, Linux is software gold.