Tony Wasserman

San Francisco

Researcher

I found this article to be quite narrow in the discussion of open source. Linux is already a foregone conclusion, widely deployed in server rooms around the world, with extensive vendor support.

To me, open source goes way beyond the operating system. Open source software such as OpenOffice, Firefox, Apache, Eclipse, sendmail, and others are also in widespread use, with more than 100 million downloads of Firefox. This year I expect to see more evaluation and acceptance of such products from the IT decision makers who make large-scale decisions about adoption and use of software in corporate settings. I've been involved in the development of Business Readiness Ratings (http://openbrr.org) as a framework to aid such evaluations.

Open source has become a disruptive force in the software industry. Traditional vendors, including IBM, BEA, Borland, and Oracle, have all made acquisitions of open source software, perhaps in reaction to the inroads being made by MySQL, PostgreSQL, JBoss, and Hibernate in their customer base.

Startups including SpikeSource and SourceLabs are offering certified stacks of open source software as a way to minimize the effort of dealing with the release cycles of open source software. Other companies, such as Blackduck and Palamida, are addressing legal issues in the source code of open source components.

The leading US analyst firms - Gartner, IDC, and Forrester - have all been developing their open source expertise for their Fortune 500 and other large clients.

In my book, 2005 was the big year for open source evaluation, and 2006 will be the year in which open source infrastructure software and applications obtain "official" IT support in large corporations, leading traditional software vendors to alter their business models to accommodate the new reality.