The other day I saw an old IBM Personal Computer reminding me of why open source has the developers and the momentum.
Once upon a long ago there were mainframes. Mainframes were big expensive computers but they had the advantage of central and hence (at least in theory) cheaper maintainace. Actually, it was cheaper to maintian a single mainframe both from a service point of view, but it also made it possible to enforce company wide standard software upon employees. Then came Microsoft and IBM and introduced the Personal Computer. For users it had this big advantage: it wasn't centralized. It was personal. You could for the first time make it suite your needs. And people did and Microsoft became no 1. The years passed and things change. The computer is still personal, but in order to make big money, Microsoft let the mainframe centralized IT thinking into the personal computer. Nowdays you may own your hardware, but with Windows, you are tied to Exchange/Outlook, tied to Sharepoint, tied to Office, tied to intranets, tied to fileshares, tied to Internet Explorer... you just got a decentralized mainframe. Enter open source. You own the software and is back in control of the data and services. The computer is personal again. Not thanks to HP but to the Free Software Foundation. The first to discover this were the developers, so they are marching towards open source big time and next are the powerusers which are bringing the momentum.
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