GitHub and Open Source growth continues to skyrocket

Brandon Butler | NetworkWorld | December 21, 2012

The meteoric growth of GitHub, some say, points to the vibrancy of the open source world in technology right now. Once seen as a series of pet projects, now open source is not just big money for big businesses -- Red Hat is the first billion-dollar open source company -- but it has gained the credibility of enterprises, causing what some call a shift in attitudes toward open source, both by business leaders and developers.

Alan Shimel, co-founder and managing partner at The CISO Group and a Network World blogger, says he sees a "second golden age" of open source right now. A first burst, driven by Linux, MySQL and other technologies broke open source on to the enterprise radar in the 1990s. Now, open source projects have just exploded -- from Android to OpenStack, Hadoop, MongoBD and others. "There's this second batch of monster, huge open source projects," he says.