The open source movement is a popular one, and it’s certainly made its mark on the software landscape. But where has it made its biggest mark? What is the most successful open source endeavor of all time?

Actually, when you see it as a whole, isn’t the Web the biggest open source success of them all?

Perhaps the most famous example is the LAMP stack that lies behind so many websites, i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. But there’s so much more when you think about it.

Here are some of the open source projects that make the Web tick.

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A benefit of open source software is the ability to take the code base of an application and develop it in a new direction. This is, as most of you probably know, called forking, and is very common in the open source community. For example, many Linux distributions can be traced back to either Debian, Fedora or Slackware.

Much of the open source software that is in popular use today was born from other projects. We thought it would be interesting to take a look at the history of some of these software forks and find out WHY they happened in the first place.

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