I’ve long been a believer in open source for the enterprise (indeed, my first book was called Succeeding with Open Source and was targeted at an enterprise audience). When I first encountered open source and grasped its characteristics, I was struck by an epiphany: once this was available, who was going to stick with the old way of doing things?
And enterprises gradually made the shift that I expected – swapping out Sun Unix for some flavor of Linux, building new applications on MySQL rather than Oracle, and adopting one of the burgeoning number of dynamic languages like PHP or Python.
For the first few years, open source adoption followed a predictable path: replacement of legacy vendors in well-established product categories due to price advantage. Many organizations also adopted open source because its distribution method (immediate download rather than after a lengthy sales process) made for greater application agility.