Exactly ten years ago, on Feb 9th 1998, Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond began the Open Source movement. It was just a different way to explain what had been already happening for quite a few years, and make it understandable for the business world. And it worked very well.

Building on the ground-breaking work of great leaders like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, we laid out the software technology that leads many markets of today’s world, entering the mainstream. When I say we it’s because I have been an active contributor of this community and an advocate of the open source concept since the beginning.

Nowadays I use open source for everything, my parents use Linux on their desktop, my friends are eager to buy an Asus EEE and major governments have state funded programs to adopt or develop open source. Several open source companies are making billions and almost everybody is saving huge money just by using it.

The idea spread even out of the software world, generating parallel incarnations in the culture generation and distribution area. Try to imagine a world without open source: no Firefox, no Open Office, no MySQL, no OLTP project, no Asus EEE, no Creative Commons, no Wikipedia, no peer-to-peer. Lately, all the biggest innovations in the software world came from the open source community are were possible because of it. There are still are some areas where Open Source has to work in order to go truly mainstream, for example Desktop applications, but we can clearly see it’s going to happen sooner or later.

Thanks to Linus, Richard, Bruce, Eric, Larry, Guido, to friends at Ferrara Linux Users Group, and to everybody who helped and believed in this amazing challenge.  Where will we stand in 2018?  I can’t wait to see that.