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While the technology market is maturing, there are still major developments to tackle. One of the most significant developments in the past few years has been the increasing importance of open-source software.

Open-source companies are unusual in that they freely distribute the code behind their software, allowing others to tweak and rewrite it. The theory is that any rewrites are then also shared. But it is not only amateurs working from their garage who are involved in this process. IBM, for example, has devoted significant resources to it.

The open-source companies then make their money by charging to package open-source products and provide support.

While Oracle is not developing open-source it has been including an open-source web server, Apache, in its products for years and recently bought Berkeley DB an open-source database company.

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