Bloomberg TV: Most of Modern Society Running Linux

Last week I had the pleasure to appear onBloomberg Westin an interview with Cory Johnson. It’s refreshing to see mainstream broadcast media embrace and understand the Linux story so well. Cory knew what he was talking about.

We covered these main ideas:

• Companies like Netflix are leveraging open source to decrease IT costs and increase scale and nimbleness. Netflix not only heavily uses open source and runs its infrastructure on AWS, they also aggressively open source tools they develop internally. Ten years ago mainstream would have found this outrageous and misguided. Today Netflix use it as a competitive advantage in hiring and maintaining their infrastructure. What are they investing the money they save on tech on? Original content that makes them even more competitive in the marketplace.

• Companies who have not embraced open source and continue down a proprietary path are struggling. Microsoft’s recent earnings put a shock through the tech markets with one analyst calling their earnings report “a comedy of errors” with a resulting drop of 11 percent.Slate.com has a great slidethat illustrates the dramatic changing market conditions we have experienced in the last decade and shows that Android/Linux has taken a huge bite out of the proprietary OSes. 

• Other industries are now seeing that open source and open collaboration allow them to leverage shared Research & Development (R&D) and innovate faster and cheaper. We have been on the front lines of this shift with ourCollaborative Projectswhere we have worked with companies like the New York Stock Exchange and projects like the SDN platformOpenDaylighton bringing Linux’ collaborative DNA to these new industries.