Open source is helping turn significant chunks of the IT infrastructure into commodities by offering alternatives to proprietary software. This is software as corn or wheat. As the products become indistinguishable, buyers will choose the cheapest, most reliable supplier they can find - and it's hard to beat open source on price.

This commodification is happening fastest at the lowest level of the infrastructure, the level that most businesspeople never see, like server operating systems and application servers (middleware). This is not an accident: Fifty-eight percent of the open-source community is made up of professional IT administrators and programmers (with 11 years of professional experience, on average) who use open source to fix problems they encounter in their jobs, according to a recent survey by the Boston Consulting Group.

Apache, the webpage server that now runs 60 percent of the world's websites, began this way. In 1994, there were no commercially available software packages for serving up webpages. Randy Terbush was one among many IT people casting about the Internet for solutions. He found seven others willing to work on the problem with him. "We said, Let's start a mailing list and work together," says Terbush, who is CEO and president of The Tribal Knowledge Group, an Alta, Wyo., infrastructure technology consultancy. He was a founding member of the nonprofit Apache Software Foundation, which develops and distributes the Apache HTTP server.

Apache's release in 1996 wasn't accompanied by a million-dollar ad campaign. Analysts and the press didn't track sales because you didn't buy Apache, you downloaded it. And you could download it once, tweak it, burn it on a CD, and install your own version on as many servers as you wanted without telling anybody and without spending a dime.

Open Source Goes Big Time

Of course, free doesn't necessarily mean without costs. Just because you download open-source applications for free doesn't mean you won't have a whole host of associated costs such as maintenance, integration and support. Right now, CIOs remain concerned about receiving support for open-source software solely from volunteers - however disciplined and dedicated - over the Internet. They want commercial vendors to sign contracts guaranteeing that the stuff will work. In our November survey of 375 IT executives, 52 percent said a lack of vendor support was open source's primary weakness.