Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison announced the company's first prominent Linux customer Tuesday: Yahoo. But Red Hat hasn't been pushed aside at the Internet company.

Open source is kind of a scary concept – but it can be very powerful. After all, this approach to programming has led to innovations like Linux, which is a robust operating system.

With open source, programmers around the world can contribute to a common code base and allow for new innovation.

Even for big companies – like Google and Yahoo – it is very expensive to completely internalize technology development. So why not open-up technologies to the world?