In an illuminating exercise conducted in 1998, IBM asked a hundred blue-chip company chief information officers if they used open source software in their companies. 95 percent said no. Yet when interviewers asked the same question of those companies’ systems administrators, 95 percent answered yes, an outcome that led IBM to make a major strategic shift into open source. Celebrated—even recognized—or not, open source software runs the Internet (and thus the world) today.
