OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING:

Open-source software has an image of radicalism. Yet it's increasingly an ally -- not enemy -- of big tech.

When Vicky Brasseur, known as VM Brasseur online, got into open-source coding more than 30 years ago, the name hadn't even been invented yet. She worked on initiatives like Project Gutenberg as part of what was then called the free culture movement, whose goal was for information to be free, and software democratic.

Today, Brasseur isn't a fringe activist or hacker. She is director of open-source strategy at Juniper Networks, a U.S. corporation with approximately 10,000 employees.

Brasseur personifies the dramatic change in what is now known as the open-source software movement. The words "open source" still call up images of radicals battling faceless corporations, of OpenOffice and Linux offering alternatives to giants like Microsoft. In 2000, Steve Ballmer, then director of Microsoft, even criticized Linux as "communist."

But more and more large corporations are embracing open-source software, which undergirds many of the commercial services we use every day. By 2016, when Microsoft moved part of its database infrastructure to Linux, Ballmer had backed off from his open-source-as-communism stance. Two years later, in 2018, Microsoft bought GitHub, a code-sharing site for open-source projects, for $7.5 billion. MySQL, an open-source system for building databases, is used by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. And amid the coronavirus pandemic, pharma giant Pfizer has announced that it is using an open-source platform to share its research findings with other companies to hasten the global race for a vaccine.

"There's hardly any commercial product available today that doesn't use open source," says Karl Popp, an expert on open source at German software corporation SAP. "Most modern software and cloud products are built on top of open source."

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