Jeffery didn't start caring about any of this until 2001, when he was forced to.

He didn't care because for years open source has been dismissed as pie-in-the-sky, a toy for geeks. But today open source is undergoing a business revolution.

In a November 2002 CIO survey of 375 information executives, 54 percent said that within five years open source would be their dominant server platform. Today, major enterprises are running mission-critical functions on open source, big vendors have lined up to support it, and reliable applications have emerged.

And CIOs who have implemented it report huge total-cost-of-ownership (TCOTCO) reductions. Alles zu TCO auf CIO.de

It's now clear that within five years, open source will transform how software is developed, sold and supported.