The Japanese internet company has announced the launch of Blockchain SS, an open source software initiative in the blockchain sector. Read more...

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is one of the hottest technology platforms these days. Businesses across various industries are currently exploring the implementation of blockchain solutions into their applications. Catering to these rising requirements, few companies are involved in the development of proprietary solutions.

As the technology progresses, the Japanese internet giant, GMO Internet Inc., has decided to make development and implementation of blockchain solutions easier by creating an open source software project. The company recently announced the official launch of the GMO Blockchain Open Source Software Project, which allows developers to build, modify and implement the projects for free.

According to reports, the GMO Blockchain OSS has already created an open source medical record sharing system, which was launched during the first week of July 2017. The company has issued a statement about its latest project, where it says,

As the first initiative, we have now created a Medical Record Sharing System based on Z.com Cloud Semi-Public Blockchain and started providing open source from today. We will continue to publish open source programs that meet various needs in the future.

Blockchain was introduced by Bitcoin, which by itself was an open source cryptocurrency protocol. Since its introduction, different blockchain protocols have emerged, some of which are open source and others proprietary. The Blockchain OSS initiative of GMO Internet will not only make readily deployable cryptocurrency ledger solutions available to the masses for virtually no cost, but it will also accelerate new developments by harnessing the power of the crowd. The advantages and success of open source projects have already been demonstrated in conventional computing by the likes of Linux.

GMO Internet already has a considerable footprint in the cryptocurrency sector. The GMO Wallet Co. Ltd., Z.com Cloud blockchain and ConoHa blockchain for dApps development are some of the initiatives the company has already undertaken.

Japan is one of the leading cryptocurrency markets in the world, where the adoption of Bitcoin, altcoins and even blockchain solutions is high. With the new Blockchain OSS, more businesses and individuals will be soon able to implement and operate blockchain based platforms on their own, while contributing to further development of the entire decentralized ledger ecosystem.

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GMO Internet Launches Blockchain OSS to Enable Widespread DLT Adoption - newsBTC

Free and open-source software is all around us today, becoming part of our lives in ways we might never know. In the early days FOSS was primarily a hobbyist alternative, but today it has become ubiquitous, making its way into our phones, our cars, our schools, government, offices and even home appliances.

This year at FOSSCON were seeing a new trend as FOSS explodes into the infrastructure space. While hardware is still largely closed behind the walls of patents and trademarks, virtual infrastructure means we are abstracted from the underlying hardware, and more and more infrastructure is being built on top of flexible, open and scalable FOSS solutions.

You can learn more about the expansion of FOSS in infrastructure and what it means to the world at FOSSCON, Philadelphias own Free and Open Source Software Conference. This free all-day event is held annually in Philadelphia, and offers a variety of talks, workshops and other content to let the community explore and learn about Free and Open Source Software. FOSSCON 2017 takes place Saturday, Aug. 26. Registration is quick and easy.

Topics this year include more than just big-business FOSS as an infrastructure solution, with talks on Stargates, Amateur Radio and a dive into the past to talk about punch cards. Attendees can also get help installing Linux on their machines, or learn about some of the other pieces of software they can use on their current computers for free.

In keeping with the Free in the name, FOSSCON is also free for everyone. The event is paid for entirely by FOSS-friendly sponsors, donors and attendees who opt to contribute to the event. The FOSSCON team believes it is important that anyone be able to make it to the event, and never wants the price of a ticket to stand in the way of the great experience that is FOSSCON.

Jonathan Simpson is a systems engineer at CoreDial and an organizer of FOSSCON, the Free and Open Source Software Conference. Check him out on LinkedIn here.

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Free and open-source software is changing the way we view infrastructure: FOSSCON 2017 - Technical.ly Philly

Internet giant GMO Internet Inc. of Japan today announced the launch of the GMO Blockchain Open Source Software Project (GMO Blockchain OSS). The system will allow users to develop programs using blockchain as open source. In a first attempt by the company using this platform, the company has developed an open source medical record sharing system and launched it on July 6th, 2017.

Learn how to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum safely with our simple guide!

The GMO Blockchain OSS (free to modify, free for commercial) programmes are capable of supporting real service development using blockchain technology. Blockchain technology enables users to record and retain data which can bedistributed on multiple computers. The system is popular for its fraud-resistant capabilities and zero downtime for a low cost. This helps the doctors access the medical history of patients quickly, in times of emergency, as soon as the user gives access to the same.

The company issued a statement on the sidelines of the launch of GMO Blockchain OSS: As the first initiative, we have now created a Medical Record Sharing System based on Z.com Cloud Semi-Public Blockchain and started providing open source from today. We will continue to publish open source programs that meet various needs in the future.

GMO Internet is investing big on developing new services using blockchain technology. This is evident from the companys participation in the cryptocurrency exchange and trading business through the newlyestablished GMO Wallet Co. Ltd. andlaunch of the Z.com Cloud blockchain and ConoHa blockchain for easy creation of distributed blockchain applications.

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Japanese Online Giant GMO Launches Open Source Blockchain Project - Finance Magnates

ExecutiveBiz: What does your role as the leader of business development for the public sector entail?

Lynne Chamberlain: Istarted with Red Hatthirteen years ago and moved to theNorth American Public Sector organization2 years later.

Red Hat has grown from $500M to $3B in revenues during this time and Paul Smiths Public Sector Organization has been a key contributor.

We started the Federal Business Development group to pursue government programs in the DOD, Intel, and Civilian Agencies. Today the organization captures both Federal and SLED programs, and supports our System Integrators through a premier partner program. The Business Development organization working with the top 20 System Integrators has successfully teamed to win major programs within Public Sector. Our continual growth of 30%+ YOY, through closing Open Source solutions that include: Linux, Cloud, Containers, Storage, middleware and management software.I have been fortunate to lead the BD organization to include 26 Capture/Alliance Managers, System Architects and BD Marketing.

ExecutiveBiz: Where do you see open-source software having the greatest impact in the public sector?

Lynne Chamberlain:Open Source softwares greatest impact is in the Cloud and Dev Ops market space.Our Cloud and middleware products provide technology leadership:

Partners, i.e., Amazon and Microsoft turn to Red Hat to secure their cloud platforms and provide customers software defined storage, and middleware.Cloud Forms from Red Hat provides a single pane of glass so customers can manage a hybrid infrastructure that allows customers to transform their environments to take advantage of the best architectures in the software industry.

Red Hat has seen significant growth in the Cyber security market.Our Open Source Linux software is the foundation for many Cyber companies to build their software stack. Companies like Forcepoint, Raytheon uses Red Hat to combat insider threat, and General Dynamics uses Red Hat for mission critical apps. Red Hat was pleased to be part of the CSRA winning team for DISAs MILCOULD.

ExecutiveBiz: You have led the growth of your division thirty percent year over year for the past twelve years. Could you tell our readers how you achieved that?

Lynne Chamberlain:When I came to Red Hat we were known as the Linux software company that provided free software or people thought. Our business model of selling subscriptions instead of perpetual licenses has proved to be the direction of the industry today.It was an easy transition for Red Hat under the Cloud model. About 95% of Public Sector customers use Red Hat Linux software over our competition.Clients use it not only for the security, but also as the building block for our other software. Through the years Red Hat has acquired state of the art software, i.e., middleware, management software, storage and made it OPEN and easy to use by the community.

As the government transforms from the old mainframe technology to the Cloud, it is important for them to find an architecture that allows compatibility to all technologies so organizations are not locked in to any one vendor.

Today, we have so many great solutions not just Linux. When you think of Red Hat, you dont think of just Linux anymore, but instead customers think of our complete stack of solutions and of all these capabilities.Our growth has on one hand been organic with the foundation being a secure OS that adheres to standards, compliance, is efficient and all at a huge cost savings to our partners and end user customers.Weve also grown through acquisitions weve acquired JBOSS, a middleware product, as well as our Cloud and Storage products.We have a whole robust open source software suite today and Gartner portrays this in their 4 Quadrant model.

ExecutiveBiz: How can the public and private sector work closer together to implement Open-source software?

Lynne Chamberlain:Many of the Federal Agencies have adopted Open Source through out their infrastructure.They view the private sector as experts and their choices in architectures and software as key indicators of the future direction of industry.Take the VA, and DHA; they have procured Open source solutions through Cerner and Optum.The SEC looks to Wall Street and their IT decisions. Both the NY Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ run on Red Hat Open Source software. The Department of Treasury looks to the Bank of America, Citibank, etc as to how they build their banking, trading, etc., solutions.They run many of their applications on Red Hat Open Source software.Law Enforcement is tightly connected between DOJ, FBI, and the Police Departments when researching finger print identification, retina scans, etc.The foundation for all this work is done on Red Hat Open Source.Red Hat has a large partner eco-system.The applications running on Red Hat range from Child Welfare, to Toll Authority, to Banking, to Healthcare, to Justice, etc.Red Hat cannot do this alone.Teaming with System Integrators, Value Added Partner, and Resellers, together make this happen.

ExecutiveBiz: What new market opportunities do you see on the horizon?

Lynne Chamberlain:The industry is our oyster. Open Source is the Industrys software technology of choice.The total package of software includes: security, compliance, a complete stack of products from the OS, Open Stack, Cloud, middleware, storage, etc.

We continue to transform ourselves in order to support our customers and partners.We not only sell software to the IT Folk within the Public Sector but we are strong in our capabilities within the mission critical applications and framework.

As Jim Cramer on MSNBC says, Red Hat is Red Hot!

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Executive Spotlight Interview with Lynne Chamberlain, VP of Business Dev. for Red Hat - ExecutiveBiz (blog)

BURLINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Black Duck, the global leader in automating the security and management of open source software, today announced a new technology collaboration with Pivotal and the launch of its Black Duck Hub product as an integrated service for Pivotal Cloud Foundry, one of the world's most powerful cloud-native platforms. This is the first open source-focused security management integration with Pivotal Cloud Foundry, enabling enterprise customers to embrace open source in their applications with automated visibility, intelligence, and control.

Black Duck and Pivotal have collaborated to integrate Black Duck Hub and Pivotal Cloud Foundry to deliver a Secure DevOps process and user experience for building and deploying applications to Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Using Black Duck Hub, enterprise customers can automatically identify all the open source components; detect and analyze known security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and code quality risks; and enable policy management to control risks and their remediation. Additionally, Hub dynamically monitors the scanned code and provides alerts on newly discovered vulnerabilities or policy violations. Enterprise customers can also use Hub to access Black Duck KnowledgeBase, the worlds most comprehensive data store of open source components and risk intelligence.

Open source comprises 80 to 90 percent of the components in a modern cloud-native application. Integration of Black Duck Hub with Pivotal Cloud Foundry provides automated visibility and control into that open source, said Black Duck CEO Lou Shipley. This helps increase enterprises confidence to increase their production deployment of cloud-native applications.

Fortune 2000 companies are facing tremendous pressure to build and deliver cloud-native applications - faster, on a larger scale, and at lower cost, said Nima Badiey, Head of Business Development, Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Combining Black Duck Hub with Pivotal Cloud Foundry helps our customers automate the security and licensing processes in their application deployment pipelines, enabling agility and innovation at cloud-native speeds.

Availability

In addition to the new integrated solution for Pivotal Cloud Foundry users, Black Duck today announced that Pivotal has become a Black Duck Hub customer for Pivotals internal use. Pivotal uses Hub as part of its internal Pivotal Cloud Foundry development and security processes to help secure and manage open source components in the Cloud Foundry project.

About Black Duck Software Organizations worldwide use Black Ducks industry-leading products to automate the process of securing and managing open source software, eliminating the pain related to security vulnerabilities, compliance and operational risk. Black Duck is headquartered in Burlington, MA, and has offices in San Jose, CA, Vancouver, London, Belfast, Northern Ireland, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing. For more information, visit http://www.blackducksoftware.com.

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Black Duck Teams Up with Pivotal to Secure and Manage Open Source Cloud-Native Applications for the Enterprise - Business Wire (press release)

Open-source-based server designer iXsystems Inc. today broadened its enterprise storage portfolio with an entry-level TrueNAS array.

The San Jose, Calif., vendor introduced the TrueNAS X10 hybrid array as a complement to its Z Series midrange family that launched three years ago. It also sells a line of FreeNAS appliances for small businesses and home offices.

All iXsystems arrays run the OpenZFS file system with at-rest data encryption, inline compression and deduplication, replication and delta-based snapshots. OpenZFS is the open source successor to the ZFS file system originally developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired in 2010 for $7.4 billion.

Privately held iXsystems has been in the server business since 1996, expanding to storage in 2009. The company doesn't publicly disclose revenues, but claimed storage sales are expected to spike about 200% by 2018.

TrueNAS X10 is a 2U chassis that supports 12 hot-swappable SAS HDDs connected via 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Customers can buy a single controller with 20 TB of raw disk capacity starting at $5,500. For high availability, a dual-controller chassis is recommended that starts at $20,000 for 120 TB. Storage scales to 360 TB in 6U with two fully populated SAS expansion shelves.

The scale-up architecture nicely balances cost and performance, said Scott Sinclair, a storage analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. in Milford, Mass.

"This is not a server architecture where you need three boxes for resiliency. They built the hardware, they fitted the box and they use their open source software-defined storage to help you build a traditional array deployment. It's got a dual controller and 120 TB of storage for under $20,000, which is pretty nice," Sinclair said.

The unified storage arrays merge RAM and solid-state drives for caching with hard disk drives for storage. The system-on-a-chip hardware is based on an Intel Pentium Xeon D-1531 six-core CPU.

The storage products integrate iXsystems' FreeNAS converged software on certified server hardware. FreeNAS is available as a download and also as a bundled stack on FreeNAS-branded hardware appliances.

FreeNAS is built atop stripped-down FreeBSD code and supports the FreeBSD-licensed bhyve hypervisor. The system also is certified for Citrix XenServer and VMware ESXi.

Projected use cases for the new arrays include backup, big data storage and file sharing. It taps into a swath of underserved small and midsize business customers, said Steve Wong, the iXsystems director of storage product management.

"Until now, we have not had a TrueNAS product at the lower end of the market for customers that need continuous data availability and uptime. We have had a lot of customers that value the capabilities of our other TrueNAS arrays, but the price has precluded them from buying," Wong said.

Wong said iXsystems expects at least half of FreeNAS X10 customers to opt for the 2U high availability option.

"We see it competing with Dell EMC VNX and Unity, as well as NetApp FAS2600 Series and HPE's [Hewlett Packard Enterprise] MSA SAN products," he said. "We also expect it to compete against rackmount systems from Qnap, Drobo and Synology."

Competition also could come from software-defined storage vendors, particularly OpenStack deployments for building private cloud storage.

"The challenge for iXsystems is going up against the big-name storage vendors," Sinclair said. "Those customers tend to be a different type of buyer than those in the SMB, who might be willing to go with a lesser-known vendor. The question is whether iXsystems can sell enough boxes at that price to achieve the necessary scale that makes business sense."

Other iXsystems include TrueNAS Z20 with 400 TB starting at $25,000, TrueNAS Z30 with 1.1 PB starting at $30,000, and the high-end TrueNAS Z35 array that starts at $40,000 and scales to 4.8 PB. The vendor also markets TrueRack rack-scale converged infrastructure to large data centers, combining its storage and servers with third-party networking switches.

Slowly but surely, open source storage gains acceptance

Is object storage really about to supplant scale-out NAS?

Storage moves toward software-defined memory

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TrueNAS X10: iXsystems' open source storage contender - TechTarget

FULTON, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sonatype, the leader in software supply chain automation, today announced the release of its third annual State of the Software Supply Chain Report. This years report highlights risks lurking within open source software components and quantifies the empirical benefits of actively managing software supply chain hygiene.

Organizations that are actively managing the quality of open source components flowing into production applications are realizing a 28 percent improvement in developer productivity, a 30 percent reduction in overall development costs, and a 48 percent increase in application quality. Furthermore, analysis of more than 17,000 applications reveals that applications built by teams utilizing automated governance tools reduced the percentage of defective components by 63%.

Conversely, organizations failing to manage software supply chains are unwittingly releasing vulnerable applications into production, wasting thousands of hours on rework and bug fixes, and facing increased liability due to gross negligence.

Additional key findings of the 2017 State of the Software Supply Chain report include:

Consumption of open source components is growing on a massive scale

Open source component suppliers remain slow to fix vulnerabilities

Number of downloaded components with known vulnerabilities is slightly decreasing

The regulatory landscape is rapidly changing

Supporting Quotes

Wayne Jackson, CEO, Sonatype Companies are no longer building software applications from scratch, they are manufacturing them as fast as they can using an infinite supply of open source component parts. However, many still rely on manual and time consuming governance and security practices instead of embracing DevOps-native automation. Our research continues to show that development teams managing trusted software supply chains are dramatically improving quality and productivity.

Mark Driver, Felix Gaehtgens, Mark ONeill, Gartner, May 2017 report Managing Digital Trust in the Software Development Life Cycle By 2020, 50% of organizations will have suffered damage caused by failing to manage trust in their, or their partners, software development life cycles (SDLC) causing revenue loss of more than 15%. Application leaders responsible for modernizing application development should re-evaluate the SDLC in the form of a trusted software supply chain, with varied levels of trust.

About the State of the Software Supply Chain Report

The 2017 State of the Software Supply Chain Report blends a broad set of public and proprietary data with expert research and analysis. This years report extends beyond Java data to include supply chain findings from JavaScript, NuGet, Python, and Docker ecosystems.

Additional Resources

About Sonatype

Sonatype is the leading provider of DevOps-native tools to automate modern software supply chains. As the creators of Apache Maven, the Central Repository, and Nexus Repository, Sonatype pioneered componentized software development and has a rich history of supporting open source innovation. Today, more than 120,000 organizations depend on Sonatypes Nexus platform to govern the volume, variety, and quality of open source components flowing into modern software applications. Sonatype is privately held with investments from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Accel Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, Bay Partners and Goldman Sachs. Learn more at http://www.sonatype.com.

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Sonatype 2017 State of the Software Supply Chain Report Reveals ... - Business Wire (press release)

Zenko provides a unified interface based on a proven implementation of the Amazon S3 API across clouds. This allows any cloud to be addressed with the same API and access layer, while storing information in their respective native format. For example, any Amazon S3-compliant application can now support Azure Blob Storage without any application modification. Scality's vision for Zenko is to add data management controls to protect vital business assets, and metadata search to quickly subset large datasets based on simple business descriptors.

"We believe that everyone should be in control of their data," said Giorgio Regni, CTO at Scality. "Our vision for Zenko is simplebring control and freedom to the developer to unleash a new generation of multi-cloud applications. We welcome anyone who wants to participate and contribute to this vision."

"With Zenko, Scality makes it even easier for enterprises of all sizes to quickly and cost-effectively deploy thousands of apps within the Microsoft Azure Cloud and leverage its many advanced services," said Jurgen Willis, Head of Product for Azure Object Storage at Microsoft Corp. "Data stored with Zenko is stored in Azure Blob Storage native format, so it can easily be processed in the Azure Cloud for maximum scalability."

Zenko builds on the success of the company's Scality S3 Server, the open-source implementation of the Amazon S3 API, which has experienced more than 600,000 DockerHub pulls since it was introduced in June 2016. Scality is releasing this new code to the open source community under an Apache 2.0 license, so that any developer can use and extend Zenko in their development.

Zenko Multi-Cloud Data Controller expands the Scality S3 Server, and includes:

Application developers looking for design efficiency and rapid implementation will appreciate the productivity benefits of using Zenko. Today, applications must be rewritten to support each cloud, which reduces productivity and makes the use of multiple clouds expensive. With Zenko, applications are built once and deployed across any cloud service.

"Cityzen Data provides a data management platform for collecting, storing, and delivering value from all kinds of sensor data to help customers accelerate progress from sensors to services, primarily for health, sport, wellness, and scientific applications," said Mathias Herberts, co-founder and CTO at Cityzen Data."Scality provides our backend storage for this and gives us a single interface for developers to code within any cloud on a common API set.With Scality, we can write an application once and deploy anywhere on any cloud."

For more information on the Scality Zenko Multi-Cloud Data Controller and to download it for free, visit http://www.zenko.io.

Register for the Zenko webinar at: http://www.zenko.io/webinar.

About ScalityScality, a world leader in object and cloud storage, develops cost-effective Software Defined Storage: the RING, which serves over 500 million end-users worldwide with over 800 billion objects in production; and the open-source Scality Zenko. Scality RING software deploys on any industry-standard x86 server, uniquely delivering performance, 100% availability and data durability, while integrating easily in the datacenter thanks to its native support for directory integration, traditional file applications and over 45 certified applications. Scality's complete solutions excel at serving the specific storage needs of Global 2000 Enterprise, Media and Entertainment, Government and Cloud Provider customers while delivering up to 90% reduction in TCO versus legacy storage. A global company, Scality is headquartered in San Francisco.

Follow us on Twitter @scality and visit us at http://www.scality.com to learn more.

Press ContactJacqueline Velasco Lumina Communications for Scality (408) 680-0564 scality@luminapr.com

Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/519854/Scality_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Scality

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Scality Launches Zenko, Open Source Software To Assure Data Control In A Multi-Cloud World - PR Newswire UK (press release)

How do companies make money with open source software? Increasingly, the answer is that they use open source programs to collect personal information from users. Here's how this new open source business strategy is changing the channel.

For most of the thirty-three year history of free and open source software, companies that developed open code relied on a set of conventional business models. They revolved around strategies like "freemium" pricing, redistributing of open source software through channel partnerships, creating foundations and selling support services.

These are the strategies that sustained old-guard open source companies like Red Hat and Canonical. They allowed them to generate revenue from software that they gave away for free.

There's a new generation of companies that are investing in open source, and they're migrating toward a new business model. They support open source development and give away software, then use that software to collect data valuable from users.

Take Google, for example. Google is a lead contributor to several important open source projects, from the Chromium Web browser to Kubernetes, a container orchestrator.

While not all of these open source programs directly feed Google's data-collection initiatives, some of them (like Chromium, the basis for Google's Chrome browser) do. And in general, there is little arguing that data collection is at the heart of Google's business strategy. Much of the money that Google infuses into the open source ecosystem to support development is paid for with users' private data.

Google's not alone. Baidu, Google's Chinese twin, is now doing something very similar. The search and cloud hosting company is releasing an open source driverless car platform with the goal of advancing data collection.

Even Canonical -- which for most of its history has stuck with traditional open source revenue-generation strategies like selling support services -- has experimented with a program that collects users' data inside Ubuntu Linux. The company abandoned that strategy last year, but it's evidence all the same of the idea that personal data can make freely redistributed software profitable.

It's a safe bet that selling support services and other conventional business models will remain central to the open source world going forward. It's perhaps only very large companies that stand to benefit from trading open code for users' data.

But the latter trend is here to stay, too -- which means open source will now have a new cost for many of its users.

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The New Open Source Business Model: Trading Code for Personal Data - The VAR Guy

GOING WAY BACK, pretty much all software was effectively open source. That's because it was the preserve of a small number of scientists and engineers who shared and adapted each other's code (or punch cards) to suit their particular area of research. Later, when computing left the lab for the business, commercial powerhouses such as IBM, DEC and Hewlett-Packard sought to lock in their IP by making software proprietary and charging a hefty license fee for its use.

The precedent was set and up until five years ago, generally speaking, that was the way things went. Proprietary software ruled the roost and even in the enlightened environs of the INQUIRERoffice mention of open source was invariably accompanied by jibes about sandals and stripy tanktops, basement-dwelling geeks and hairy hippies. But now the hippies are wearing suits, open source is the default choice of business and even the arch nemesis Microsoft has declared its undying love for collaborative coding.

But how did we get to here from there? Join INQas we take a trip along the open source timeline, stopping off at points of interest on the way, and consulting a few folks whose lives or careers were changed by open source software.

The GNU projectThe GNU Project (for GNU's not Unix - a typically in-jokey open source monicker, it's recursive don't you know?) was created by archetypal hairy coder and the man widely regarded as the father of open source Richard Stallman in 1983. GNU aimed to replace the proprietary UNIX operating system with one composed entirely of free software - meaning code that could be used or adapted without having to seek permission.

Stallman also started the Free Software Foundation to support coders, litigate against those such as Cisco who broke the license terms and defend open-source projects against attack from commercial vendors. And in his spare time, Stallman also wrote the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), a "copyleft" license, which means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms - in 1989. Now on its third iteration GPLv3, it remains the most popular way of licensing open source software. Under the terms of the GPL, code may be used for any purpose, including commercial uses, and even as a tool for creating proprietary software.

PGPPretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption was created in 1991 by anti-nuclear activist Phil Zimmerman, who was rightly concerned about the security of online bulletin boards where he conversed with fellow protesters. Zimmerman decided to give his invention out for free. Unfortunately for him, it was deployed outside of his native USA, a fact that nearly landed him with a prison sentence, digital encryption being classed as a munition and therefore subject to export regulations. However, the ever-resourceful Mr Zimmerman challenged the case against him by reproducing his source code in the form of a decidedly-undigital hardback book which users could scan using OCR. Common sense eventually won the day and PGP now underpins much modern communications technology including chat, email and VPNs.

"PGP represents the democratisation of privacy," commented Anzen Data CIO and developer of security software, Gary Mawdsley.

LinuxIn 1991 Finnish student and misanthrope Linus Torvalds created a Unix-like kernel based on some educational operating system software called MINIX as a hobby project. He opened up his project so that others could comment. And from that tiny egg, a mighty penguin grew.

Certainly, he could never have never anticipated being elevated to the position of open-source Messiah. Unlike Stallman, Torvalds, who has said many times that he's not a "people person" or a natural collaborator (indeed recent comments have made him seem more like a dictator - albeit a benevolent one), was not driven by a vision or an ideology. Making Linux open source was almost an accident.

"I did not start Linux as a collaborative project, I started it for myself," Torvalds said in a TED talk. "I needed the end result but I also enjoyed programming. I made it publicly available but I had no intention to use the open-source methodology, I just wanted to have comments on the work."

Nevertheless, like Stallman, the Torvalds name is pretty much synonymous with open source and Linux quickly became the server operating system of choice, also providing the basis of Google's Android and Chrome OS.

"Linux was and is an absolute game-changer," says Chris Cooper of compliance software firm KnowNow. "It was the first real evidence that open could be as good as paid for software and it was the death knell of the OS having a value that IT teams would fight over. It also meant that the OS was no longer a key driver of architectural decisions: the application layer is where the computing investment is now made."

Red HatRed Hat, established in 1995, was among the first proper enterprise open source companies. Red Hat went public in 1999 with a highly successful IPO. Because it was willing to bet big on the success of open source at a time when others were not, Red Hat is the most financially buoyant open source vendor, achieving a turnover of $1bn 13 years later. Red Hat's business model revolves around offering services and certification around its own Linux distribution plus middleware and other open source enterprise software.

"Red Hat became successful by making open source stable, reliable and secure for the enterprise," said Jan Wildeboer, open source affairs evangelist at the firm.

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How open source took over the world - The INQUIRER