“The best known open-source projects take advantage of established standards — Linux and Unix; Sendmail and SMTP; MySQL and SQL; Apache and HTTP; Mozilla and HTML. But then again, so do most of the proprietary applications these days. “
The odd one out here is Linux/Unix, Linux is a flavor of Unix, which is an archetype rather than a standard. Hair splitting aside, Kevin makes a profound point about the involvement of standards in a ‘networked’ computer environment: “Networked computing necessarily requires standards, because no one entity controls the whole environment.”
In other words, the real threat to people like Microsoft may not be Open Source – but Open Standards. Microsoft had to compete with free browsers and web servers, by offering IE free and an OS bundled web server, but Linux and to a much lesser extent MySQL are a much bigger threat to Sun and Oracle since they encroach upon their core expertise and cash cows.
Proprietary value-add seems to be more compelling for consumers i.e. the desktop rather than the server. Linux has won the server OS market and Sun is essentially pitching Solaris as a free OS these days. Generic server-side software is increasingly free, plaform vendors beware.