Editor's note: This article was originally published in November, 2013. It was last updated in April 2017.

Take a look at the next desktop PC or laptop you come across. Odds are good it won't be running an open-source operating system. Microsoft's closed-source Windows has by far the highest share of the PC client operating system market, followed in a distant second by Apple's macOS. Linux and other wholly open source operating systems have only a tiny market share.

It's not hard to see why. Despite the advances made by distributions such as Ubuntu, desktop Linux is still miles behind Windows and macOS in terms of the look, the feel and the slickness that most office workers have come to expect. The vast majority of companies simply aren't prepared to make office workers use an open source OS — and most office workers aren't prepared to use them, either.

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Changing your business processes to match your software sounds like a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. After all, business leaders are responsible for deciding how their company is run, and software is supposed to support that, helping the company run as efficiently as possible.

Yet this is exactly what is happening in 82 percent of enterprises, according to a survey by TrackVia, maker of a low-code software development platform. These companies report changing a part of their business operations or processes to match the way their software works.

Is allowing corporate software to dictate how a company is run an abrogation of management's duty to manage, or can it sometimes be the best way to manage a company?

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Talk about starting a business based on open source software and the conversation will inevitably shift to Red Hat. That's because the Linux vendor is a shining example of a company that's making money from an open source product. But how easy is it really to establish an open source startup that makes money? For every success story like Red Hat there are companies like Cyanogen that fail to thrive  and projects that are abandoned.

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Eight years ago, the CyanogenMod project exploded onto the mobile device software scene. The Android-based open source mobile operating system quickly caught the attention of developers, Android fans and investors, and attracted interest from tech giants including Microsoft and Google. But at the end of last year the project imploded spectacularly.  Today the CyanogenMod project is no more, but the arc of its story offers fascinating insight into the world of open source software development.

The project started out innocently enough following the discovery, in 2008, of a way to root mobile phones running Google's Android operating system, allowing modified firmware to be installed on rooted devices. One such piece of firmware was created by a developer called Steve Kondik, whose online handle was Cyanogen — a colorless toxic gas made by oxidizing hydrogen cyanide. The modified firmware was known as CyanogenMod.

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Slack exploded onto the scene three years ago, and since then just about everyone from industry giants like Facebook to small groups of open source developers have been getting in on the team collaboration software act.

Today the pace of collaboration software development and innovation is frenetic, and according to research by G2 Crowd, a peer-to-peer business review platform, the boom in corporate adoption shows no sign of slowing down in the near future. It found that more than half of all companies have already implemented team collaboration solutions of one kind or another, and 31 percent plan to adopt one in the next two years.

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Adversity makes strange bedfellows, and in the case of VMware — a company that has made its fortune selling server virtualization software — that bedfellow is Amazon Web Services (AWS), the  public cloud leviathan.

Let's rewind to the middle of October, when Mark Lohmeyer, a VMware cloud business unit vice president,  announced that the company was forming a strategic partnership with AWS so that VMware's server virtualization and other software could be run in the AWS public cloud. The idea is that VMware customers using the company's software to run a private cloud in their own data centers will be able to expand into a similar VMware infrastructure run in AWS's public cloud, thereby forming a VMware-based hybrid cloud. The VMware software (called vCenter) used by company administrators to manage the private cloud will reach into the AWS cloud to manage the VMware software running there as well.

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Picture this: Your company's network is facing a DDoS attack, but you have no idea who is responsible or what their motivation might be. Without this knowledge, you can't tell if they want money in exchange for stopping the attack or if the attack is a diversion to occupy your security team while your network is being penetrated and commercial secrets are stolen.

In the aftermath of a network breach it can also be incredibly useful to know some information about the likely attackers. That's because knowing who they were — or just where they were from — can help you carry out a more accurate damage assessment exercise.  This knowledge can guide you where to look for signs of data compromise, and what other specifics (such as exploit kits or Trojans that may have been left behind) to search for.

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Microsoft is betting on artificial intelligence (AI) with the creation at the end of September of a new AI and Research Group. This newly formed group brings together Microsoft's research organization and more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers focused on AI and is now the fourth major division in the company, on par with the Windows, Office and Cloud divisions.

The job of the AI and Research Group will be to work on four overarching initiatives:

• Harnessing AI through agents such as Cortana, the company's digital personal assistant
• Infusing AI into Skype, Office 365 and every other Microsoft application
• Making cognitive capabilities such as vision and speech and machine analytics available to external developers
• Using Azure to build a powerful AI supercomputer in the cloud to provide "AI as a Service”

Picture this: Your company is ticking along nicely, making use of a reliable and well-engineered piece of software to support some important business process, when suddenly it becomes apparent that all is not well in the project's developer community. A fork is in the cards, and the very future of the project hangs in the balance.

Before we get to the crucial questions of whether a fork is really such a bad thing and what a CIO should do when faced with one, let's first be clear about what we're talking about.

In their study of software forks, researchers Gregorio Robles and Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain define a fork like this:

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"If you use any open source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source." That's what former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said back in 2001, and while his statement was never true, it must have spread some FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about free software. Probably that was the intention.

This FUD about open source software is mainly about open source licensing. There are many different licenses, some more restrictive (some people use the term "protective") than others. Restrictive licenses such as the GNU General Public License (GPL) use the concept of copyleft, which grants people the right to freely distribute copies and modified versions of a piece of software as long as the same rights are preserved in derivative works. The GPL (v3) is used by open source projects such as bash and GIMP. There's also the Affero GPL, which provides copyleft to software that is offered over a network (for example as a web service.)

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