Open source

As desktop computing is still dominated by proprietory systems, open source software may not have a perception of being omnipresent, but it is.
The chances are good that your favourite website or online game is served by open source technologies.
In a recent survey conducted by Netcraft, of 947,029,805 sites surveyed Apache still has the biggest webserver share with 37.45% with Microsoft coming in second at 33.58%.
Ngnix has been growing in popularity and its share now stands at 14.42%, with other developers making up the remaining 15% or so.
W3Tech have Unix systems making up 67.2% of market share for websites, 54.4% of which are the various Linux distros.  Open source languages such as PHP, Python and Perl
remain popular and according to the TIOBE Index, C is still the most popular programming language.  MySQL is the most popular open source database platform,
although Postgres and NOSQL platforms like MongoDB and Cassandra are also increasing in popularity.

At Internap Japan we use a number of open source technologies internally.  Our internal servers are running Ubuntu and internally developed applications use PHP, MySQL and Apache.
The typical LAMP stack.  Open source virtualization platforms such as VirtualBox allow us to conduct server installation training on an isolated network without disrupting the office network.
Recently we’ve also set up an OpenStack private cloud, again an open source platform writen mostly in Python.  Systems that were previously beyond creation using physical or proprietory
platforms due to cost are now easier and more cost effective to implement.  Spinning up a virtual server with OpenStack takes a matter of seconds and allows you to destroy, erase and improve
your designs quicker than if you were using purely physical machines.

Open source network virtualization platforms also give us an opportunity to conduct troubleshooting scenarios or to tweak BGP settings that would cause disruption to customer traffic if
performed on our production network.  It’s not cost effective to create a physical model of our production network, so virtualization platforms give us the means to conduct practical
training or to conduct experiments for only the cost of the hardware needed to run it.

There is also a vibrant online open source community.  The chances are that whatever problem you are facing, someone else has also had the same issue and has found a solution online.
Learning to use the MAN pages, searching online and learning from your mistakes may sometimes feel like you are dancing to a discordant system of log messages and tersely written instructions,
but it won’t take 25 years and the skills learned will help you find strength beyond strength.  These things are to me, some of the allures of the open source movement, that and sharing
the fruits of one’s labours with others.  Teaching others is one way of giving back to the open source community and of reinforcing what you have learned. So may you not all forget, or as they said in ancient Rome, ne obliviscaris!