77 A day without Open Source
Friday 11th May, 2007
Link updated April 2015
This interesting article hypothesises a day without Open Source software. It raises some interesting points.
For starters, the Internet would “disappear” for the average user. Most Domain Name Servers (DNS) are run on open source software like BIND, which turns www.whurley.com into the IP address of the appropriate server. The majority of basic Internet users would be literally lost in translation.
It's the readers' comments which raise some of the more interesting points. Imagine suddenly being without Firefox, Mac OSX (based on FreeBSD), Apache.
MSN couldn't handle load without open source.
Their sole load balancing solution is boxes from F5 Networks, all running embedded linux
Other readers mentioned that Windows would lose it's TCP/IP stack (based on FreeBSD), and that many cell phones, home routers, e-mail, and most NAS devices would stop working.