Does Open Source's Rise Spell The End Of Traditional Software Vendors?

It's clear that open source is shaking up the technology industry. What isn't yet clear is how this impacts legacy vendors.

After years of struggling to swim against the tides of open source and cloud computing, traditional software vendors are clearly under fire. At the same time, it's also clear that open source is driving most of the big trends in technology today, from mobile to cloud to Big Data.

What isn't clear, however, is that going forward all technology vendors will become Red Hat.

Open Source's Outsized Impact

Ten years ago, a new open source company or project was news. Not anymore. Open source dominates mobile, with Android displacing the seemingly unbeatable iOS in both smartphones and tablets. Open source also dominates cloud, with every significant cloud platform except Azure built using open source. And even Azure treats open-source technologies as first-class citizens on its platform. And open source dominates Big Data, with Hadoop and NoSQL technologies the major forces used for managing the world's data explosion.