Say “open source software” to most people and they’ll conjure up an image of an alpha geek hunched over a keyboard, doing complicated things with command line interfaces. All very well for the geeks, they think, but not for ordinary mortals, and certainly too risky for my business.

In fact, open source software (OSS) is already ubiquitous in all sorts of places. For one thing, it runs most of the world’s web servers, probably including yours. Apache has around 55 percent of the total world market share for web servers, rising to 66 percent for the million busiest sites, compared to just 17 percent for its nearest rival Microsoft. And it’s held that leading position since 1996.