What became the punk rock genre may be a harbinger of what is in store for the open source movement —  but hopefully not. At any rate, open source’s popularity can certainly be compared to punk rock’s rise. When Linux began to be seen as a powerful and very practical alternative to Unix, and especially, Windows, during the 1990s, the movement then felt very...well, underground.

Trading discs of Linux distros and sharing tips on how to hack “Doom” (okay, the hacks were open source but Doom’s code was obviously wasn’t). But hopefully, open source will take a different path than what became of punk rock, especially for enterprises, as open matures, or to take the punk rock analogy further, become corporate musak.

The punk rock comparison was one a main theme of this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast recorded during VMware World San Francisco, with guests Tom Petrocelli, a research fellow at Amalgam Insights, and Adam Jacob, CEO at The System Initiative and former CTO of Chef Software. They described what the open source movement has become and where it’s heading, and more importantly, what it all means for enterprises.