&A Three or four years ago, open-source providers enjoyed plenty of attention. Just ask Novell, which more or less reinvented itself thanks to the open-source fairy dust provided by its acquistion of the Suse Linux distribution.
But now some of the disruptive energy seems to have dropped away, as attention turns increasingly to the collaborative potential of the Web. Google and the buzzword du jour, Web 2.0, are capturing the attention once enjoyed by the struggle between Linux, Windows and Unix. As the operating system layer becomes commoditized, focus appears to be shifting to the Web as the real disruptive platform.
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