San Diego, CA: At LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation‘s annual North American technical conference, Jim Zemlin’s, the Foundation’s executive director said, “If you are going to master software development, you must master open source.”

Why is it important for businesses to master open source? Zemlin said it’s because “Software is the future of IT. Hardware is important to enable software, but what I mean that the value that end-users sees from technology increasingly comes from the software.”

He then showed a slide of half-a-dozen smartphones that were turned off and pointed out that even with a very technical crowd, “If you just look at the hardware of smartphones, you can’t tell them apart, it’s only when you turn them on that you can tell the differences.”

Zemlin said that all successful tech companies are now using and contributing to open source communities. “Besides the usual suspects–Amazon, Google, IBM– there are companies that you may not think of as being big open-source companies, even competitors, now admit that they must participate in open source.”

Like who? Zemlin pointed out that “Microsoft is now supporting Linux in their cloud. Not because they want to, but because their customers demand it.”

Apple, Microsoft, VMware: Everyone’s building open-source software. More >