It's a man's world. That's common knowledge; it seems to be especially true in the land of IT, and even more so in the world of Linux and open source. The gender bar is so high that some women must feel as if Baud declared, "I love the smell of testosterone in the morning," as he set out to create career paths in these communities.

But hold on, pilgrim. There have always been those among us who refuse to accept a gender-specified place in the community. There's amazing Grace Hopper, for one, and Carly Fiorina, CEO at Hewlett-Packard, for another. And there's Bonnie Crater, CEO of OpenSales, as well.

I have to admit that when I first met Crater, I assumed that she was with OpenSales' public relations department. My daughter would not have been proud of me for making that assumption, and rightfully so. After all, when she achieved her dream of becoming a NASCAR driver and competed in that sport for five years, she did her part to remove a lot of gender-based role restrictions from my psyche.

Having made peace with my male ego, I recently asked Crater what it was like to be the CEO of an open source firm, a role that seats her at the captain's table in the very heart of the "boys' club." Her response was revealing. Where others see adversity, long odds, and bias, Crater sees nothing but opportunity. She told me, "I think we are very fortunate in our industry where it really doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman in these various roles ... I firmly believe that our industry has provided opportunity for lots of women to be successful and I am fortunate to be one of them."

With that sort of leadership at the helm, a lot traditional firms offering proprietary e-commerce products have even more reason to start worrying about an open source contender moving into their space.

Crater at OpenSales

OpenSales was founded in 1998 by the Ferber boys, Rob and Glenn. (Actually, the two are not related; they simply share the same last name.) Rob was previously with eToys and Glenn was with American Digital Media. Crater joined the firm as CEO in December of 1999.

Currently, the company's primary software offerings are OpenSales AllCommerce and OpenSales Retailer. Both are written in Perl, covered by the GPL, and available for download from OpenSales' developer site (see Resources for a link). The company's business model, of course, is to give away the software and sell service.

Crater's background is in traditional software and services. She cut her management teeth with Oracle, where she ended up as

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