Treffer: A NEW PROGRAM FOR THE ENTERPRISE.

The article discusses the increase in adoption of open source tools in business enterprises. All it takes on word to explain why software whose source code is open for the whole world to see is becoming so widely adopted by profit-seeking enterprises. This is because it is free. It is easy to forget that a big reason Microsoft reigns supreme on the desktop is the support its programs have enjoyed from software developers, both inside and outside the company. Developers in the 1990s turned to Microsoft's Visual Basic programming language and Access database quickly and cheaply prototype applications on the personal computer, or to create ad hoc solutions to problems that would take too long to solve with traditional developmental tools. But the same characteristics--quickness and cheapness--that once turned developers toward Microsoft tools are now beginning to turn them toward open source equivalents. In particular, they are turning to the Python programming language instead of Visual Basic and the MySQL database instead of Access. Then when they want to run their applications across multiple servers and the Web, they frequently are putting at least the first draft of their applications on the Apache Web server. And the whole shooting match runs on the Linux operating system.