Trickle-Down Open Source
Paul Rubens on how tech giants spread open source programming love:
The trickle-down effect is particularly important because the challenges that Google, Facebook and other Internet giants faced a few years ago building large-scale applications with huge numbers of concurrent users are exactly the ones faced today by thousands of established companies and startups offering Web- or mobile-based applications to large numbers of their customers.
These companies are discovering that many of the problems they’re facing have already been solved.
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Part of the reason for this is a natural technology trickle-down effect, according to Mark Driver, a research director at Gartner. “Today’s leading edge super high tech is tomorrow’s standard product,” he says. “Also, large companies (like Google and Facebook) understand the collaborative nature of open computing and the dynamics that drive the Internet. So it’s natural that they share these technologies and strengthen the industry around them.”
I also find this interesting in context of last February’s Linux Development Report:
The number of paid developers is on the rise, as companies aggressively recruit top Linux talent. More than 80 percent of kernel development is done by developers who are being paid for their work. Volunteer developers tend not to stay that way for long.
I am Brandon Keepers, and I work at