It is with some sadness that I am writing my last editorial for Enterprise Open Source Magazine. As the founding editor-in-chief of this magazine and a past contributor to its predecessor, I am going to miss it. However, all things must end and this chapter of my writing career, I am happy to say, ends on a high note.

During my career I have had the privilege and the misfortune to be involved with quite a few nascent businesses. Some have been small, with no more than five or ten employees. To this day they still have that many or less. Others grew from 50 employees to over 10,000 in a very short time. In every case there was a technology component involved in my job.

Open source owes its success to a large group of people who have a shared set of values about which they feel strongly. Mainstream society probably lacks any real understanding of the things that matter to them in the world of open source. It's ironic that the term came from a fictitious Martian language. Most people not in the know look at devoted open source developers as if they hailed from the red planet.

There was a time when you couldn't shut me up about the Linux desktop. I was a fanatic. In 2000, I made the switch to a full-time virus-free Linux desktop and weeks of crash-free computing. I was a zealot. However, I did suffer from a few of the alternative operating systems shortcomings. My preferred desktop vendor deemed my Linux laptop1 unsupported, so if I ever had a problem, I had to boot into Windows to receive assistance. When someone sent me a macro-laden spreadsheet, I was forced to run Excel within a virtualized Windows instance2 to read the document as intended. Finally, when it came to wireless, I suffered a multitude of connection problems. While I loved the speed, the stability, and the security, it lacked convenience.

These days, executives realize that there are 'new school' ways of acquiring a company with a software asset. For all of the immeasurable benefits it has brought to the development community, open source technology has added a complex variable to relevant parties calculating the M&A equation. Open source code, the general reuse of open source and proprietary software components in software development, have further complicated the process of acquiring a software asset.

I had originally written an editorial for this month's issue titled, 'Is Commercialization Killing Open Source?' Then I read William Hurley's blog (ht tp://talk.bmc.com/blogs/b log-whurley/whurley/opens ville). William or as his friends call him, 'whurley,' is the chief architect of open source strategy at BMC. He gets to the heart of an issue that is being brought to light as a greater number of businesses adopt open source business models: 'As a greater commercial influence exerts itself in the open source community, will these companies run roughshod on those early pioneers who have demonstrated the effectiveness of the open source model?'

Of late there has been a lot of buzz around what constitutes open source software. Industry leaders and pundits alike have weighed in on the 'openness' of certain software and companies' business models. The generally recognized test for open source software is the Open Source Definition drafted by Bruce Perens and endorsed by the Open Source Initiative, the non-profit organization that shepherds open source licenses and gives an industry-recognized stamp of approval for these licenses.

Blogs are a great platform for people to espouse their passions (not unlike editorials). They are different than traditional news outlets because they may be objective, opinionated, and even wrong. Interestingly enough, each of these behaviors is frequently rewarded equally.

The other day I was driving down the highway when I passed an American classic, a 1965 Ford Mustang. As I waxed nostalgic, I realized that there will never be another era in history where we will appreciate automobiles like those produced in the 1950s and 1960s. No matter what their merits, I don't foresee automobile aficionados 50 years from now tooling around in a Toyota Prius, Honda minivan, or any of today's plastic-covered modes of transit.

This has been an exciting month for proponents of the Linux server. Two of the world's largest software companies have started to provide Linux support and services. As you probably already know, on October 25, Oracle announced that they would be selling their own derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux called Unbreakable Linux. This was huge news. Then, in an even more shocking announcement, Microsoft stated on November 2 that they would be collaborating with Novell for better Windows and Linux interoperability and would even be giving away coupons for SuSE Linux Enterprise collaboration and support. And deeper into the rabbit hole we go...

Let me preface this discussion with the disclaimer that I am not the typical desktop user. I am technical; I am mobile and travel frequently; I support and use software that runs on multiple operating systems; and I am an incessant tinkerer. Now that we got that out of the way, let me share the benefits of the day-to-day travels from Linux to Windows and sometimes Mac OS. For years I lived in a world dominated by a single operating system, only occasionally challenged by Apple. Now a new chapter is being written.

First, Internet access will be the core telecom service of the future. Not only will essentially everyone in the developed world be connected to the Internet, but more and more applications will migrate to the Internet. In our homes we will use a variety of devices which communicate via the Internet. We will use telephone-like devices to have voice conversations over the Internet. We will use one-way and two-way video devices that communicate through the Internet. We will use many different web-capable and email-capable devices. And certainly we will use important new Internet applications that we cannot yet imagine.

In the 1964 Bob Dylan song The Time's They are A-Changin' it says, 'Come gather 'round people, wherever you roam and admit that the waters around you have grown, And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you is worth savin' then you better start swimmin' Or you'll sink like a stone. For the times they are a-changin.'