Open-source projects start??”and also die??”all the time. Each project starts to address
what a user, or group of users, perceives as a relative shortcoming in the current
computing landscape. OpenOffice.org was derived from StarOffice to address the
lack of an open-source Office suite. Mozilla has grown from the ashes of Netscape to
compete with IE (Internet Explorer), which led to the creation of Firefox??”it has not
only provided an alternative to IE but has also revitalized the browser wars, even
garnering attention to its commercial competitor, Opera. Also, there is no end to the
innovations that Perl and PHP have brought about.
Even non-free software benefits from OSS. Iterations of Microsoft Windows have
utilized versions of FreeBSD-based implementations of the TCP-IP stack, for their
network implementations. Commercial routers from companies like Linksys
have embedded Linux in them; even gamers are affected, for example the Sony
PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii are both designed to run Linux.
However, there has always been an area that is severely lacking, and that is the
area of business intelligence. While there are solutions such as writing Perl or PHP
scripts, these really don't leverage full-fledged business intelligence (the idea that
reports and tools can be used by businesses to make strategic decisions, based on
short-term and long-term data and trend analysis).
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