With the fast growth of virtualized data centers, and companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook, it's easy to forget how much is built on open-source components, aka commodity software. In a very real way open-source has enabled the huge explosion of commodity hardware, the fast growth of the internet itself, and now the further acceleration through cloud services, cloud infrastructure, and virtualization of data centers.
Your typical internet stack and application now stands on the shoulders of tens of thousands of open source developers and projects. Let's look at a few of them.
1. Operating System - Linux
The commodity hardware craze would never have happened without the help of an open-source operating system to run on it. Linux is an old story now, nonetheless everything else stands on it's shoulders.
2. Multi-purpose Webserver - Apache
As of July …
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