Looking back
Back in Finland, where both Linux and MySQL had originally been developed, a cautious and nervous pride was brewing. Open source was amazing, but would it mesh well with the orderly and institutional instincts of Finnish, and more broadly Nordic, society? Despite the modernity of the Nordic model, it took time for people to get used to the thought of full openness, unlimited participation and the freedom to use, modify and redistribute software code.But we needed not worry. Open source became one of the leading IT trends of the first decade of this century. Red Hat's stellar growth paved the way for the rest of us, and soon JBoss and MySQL were not just household names among developers but household names among purchasing managers too. The disruption the LAMP stack and others caused to the incumbent players in the software industry was a perfect example of the Innovator's Dilemma as described by Professor Clayton Christensen. No wonder that large corporations were circling around the small and innovative open source companies - trying to figure whether to ignore them, love them, hate them, or try to swallow them.
