Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

Looking at our radically different future computing paradigm, and at the freedom that it should bring so many of us, we must think of where all of the programs are going to come from. Are that likely to come from legacy shops like Microsoft and IBM? Hardly. There are heavily invested in the current paradigm, and will likely remain there. The basis for a new way of doing things usually comes from new places and our business computing future will be no different.

The future of business computing is going to require innovation above all else. If you look around the software world, you will find that many of the innovations that have changed the way we view computers and ourselves have come from the Open Source community. I don't use the word community lightly. Most Open Source development represents community at it's finest.

The programmers on open source projects, for the most part, have day jobs. They do what they are doing because they like it, not because they are getting paid. The people that write Open Source software are the same people that write commercial software, by and large. After writing software all day for a living, they come to open source projects to enjoy what they are doing, and to invent the future.

Open Source projects are not bound by the bottom line. In truth, there are very few boxes drawn around this programming community. They write their own programming languages, and build their own platforms. They code their own databases. And they write new ideas into reality in their spare time. Open Source projects are where the really new ideas are being translated into fact.  They are where our computing future is coming from.

Support them where you can, any way you can.