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Is it possible to run a business entirely on open source software?

21 October 2019

Ten years ago, the idea of running a business using only free and open source software (FOSS) might have got heads scratching. In the past few years, it’s certainly become more user-friendly than it used to be – thanks in large part to Mark Shuttleworth’s Canonical and the Ubuntu Linux distribution. But with the rise of the iPad, tablet computing seemed to be the future, and the foundations that looked after Linux desktop software were about to make some disastrous design choices that would take years to recover from.

Today, it’s a different matter entirely. Of course you could run a business using nothing but FOSS; your author has been doing exactly that for 13 y ears. There are very few areas where there isn’t a licence-free alternative to proprietary software that is at least as good, if not better. Open source operating systems run at least two-thirds of the internet servers in the world, and are overwhelmingly dominant when it comes to big data or supercomputing. And its impact is growing so much that the ink has only just dried on IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat, whose spin on the Linux operating system is one of the most popular in the world. Then there’s last year’s acquisition of Github, the vastly popular open source code hosting platform, by the FOSS community’s one-time nemesis, Microsoft, which has itself embraced open source – to a degree. It’s now possible to spin up a Linux Bash shell from within Windows, and in June, the firm revealed that there are now more Linux virtual machines running on its Azure cloud than there are Windows ones.

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