Over the past decade, the open-source software community has grown from a fringe movement into being a part of the technology industry establishment. Its ideas about sharing code and opening up the source – once derided as naive or dangerous – no longer seem radical. Even the most conservative companies now run at least some open source software in some corner of their datacentres.

And yet, open source vendors and developer communities appear to just be getting started. With the Linux operating system and Apache Web server now fixtures in datacentres around the world, open source advocates have set their sights on the middleware and systems management markets as the next opportunities for growth.