Sitewide
RSS Feed:
2007 Forecast: Open Source
 |
By: Robin Bloor Published: 19th January 2007 Copyright © 2007 |
Delicious
Digg
reddit
Facebook
StumbleUponIf I read the runes correctly, the hopes of many of the committed followers and proponents of Open Source have been disappointed by its progress in recent times. Admittedly, the attempt by SCO to stop Linux in its tracks (or get a royalty from its use) looks to have failed and last year saw Microsoft almost accommodating Open Source in a deal with Novell (but not without spreading a little FUD).
However, it also saw Oracle train its big guns on Red Hat, threatening to spoil its whole business model simply by competing directly—and this was not long after Oracle had embarrassed MySQL by buying up the Open Source providers of two of the database's key complementary components. On the desktop and laptop it is not Linux but Apple that is providing genuine competition for Microsoft and in other areas, such a mobile devices, it looks like Linux is not really a significant player.
What I think is happening is neither the defeat of Open Source, nor its saturation. I think we have become too accustomed to treating Open Source products as if they were commercial products and thus trying to judge their progress in terms of growth and market share. I don't think you can look at it like that.
A good deal of Open Source adoption doesn't occur in the same way as the purchase of commercial product. I was at an IT site recently that suddenly decided to use Hibernate. Why? Because some contractor on the project had used it. The product adoption process must have taken a whole ten minutes (about the time it takes to download). But nobody would adopt Open Office in the same way. It would be a major decision and a staff training issue would need to be addressed.
I still keep seeing signs that some Open Source products are likely to increase market share. Microsoft's introduction of IE7 seems to have had no effect on the population of Firefox users (despite one or two analysts suggesting that users would switch back). The Firefox user base continues to grow (and so does that of Apple's Safari and Opera, by very small amounts). IE7 is simply replacing IE6. The adoption of Open Office may be slow, but as far as I can tell it is increasing (and so is the user base of Apple's iWork).
Microsoft clearly doesn't have a full lock hold on the office market. It will be interesting to see what effect the new version of Office has. Microsoft has introduced a new file format for the first time in 10 years and a new interface. Although the product is clearly improved, I expect it to have a very slow take-up. I also expect that it will cause some defections to Open Office. (When there's going to be a learning curve anyway, why not go for the zero cost product?) How many defections? Significant numbers but not vast is my expectation.
Another interesting Open Source play comes from EnterpriseDB which has embarrassed Oracle by acquiring some high profile defections from Oracle (Sony and Vonage). If you didn't know EnterpriseDB is a version of PostgreSQL which has a full PL/SQL capability. (Ninety percent of Oracle applications work with no changes). EnterpriseDB is not zero cost but it cuts the Oracle cost to ribbons. If I were Red Hat looking for a way to defend myself against Oracle I'd buy, merge with or strongly partner with EnterpriseDB. I expect EnterpriseDB to succeed—in time it will challenge SQL Server and DB2, if it continues to have success against Oracle.
Another factor in the Open Source equation is the OLPC (the $100 laptop or OneLaptopPerChild) initiative. It hasn't taken off dramatically yet, but it has clearly gained enough traction for us to know that it will persist. In time, this initiative will boost the Linux laptop market in a dramatic way. It is quite likely that the OLPC initiative will lead to the manufacture of 10 million laptops per year for use in developing countries. This constitutes about 10 percent of the global laptop market.
So in summary, the Open Source story is, like the curate's egg, good in parts. Linux is still a growing force and the commercial use of Open Source is becoming increasingly common in many areas. There was even a recommendation to use it from the EC recently, which stated quite clearly that the evidence is that Open Source reduces costs. Well, duh!
Reader Comments
We are no longer accepting comments against this item. We suggest contacting the author directly.
19th January 2007: 'Pogson' said:
FLOSS adoption is a raging fire here. Of course, I am fanning the flames ;-). I am a teacher in a small school that moved to a new building. Filling the prescription for IT in every classroom, we chose a system of Ubuntu/Dapper + LTSP. The saving on licences and the use of thin clients and gigabit/s permitted us to have twice as many seats as a Windows XP/2003 solution used in many schools. Of course most of our current needs are met by the LAMP stack and stuff in the distro. XP and Lose95 are still being used for a couple of legacy applications in particular areas but we added 153 Linux seats which require only a few minutes per day to administer. Education is one market where MSFT is vulnerable. When they cut support for XP, the fire will spread.
19th January 2007: 'Duncan' said:
I switched to Ubuntu's Dapper, and more recently Edgy Eft. This desktop Linux OS is amazing and just keeps getting better.
Sure there are times that I hunger for some big, overbloated commercial app - but just as quickly this feeling subsides when I learn of more open source projects.
I would recommend getting the automatix updates to add Flash, Adobe Acrobat Reader, VMWare, Google Apps and more - getautomatix.com
21st January 2007: 'ArkEngr' said:
I find that exposure to someone using Open Source is the key to spreading it. Once a group of engineers have seen it used successfully they become willing to try it themselves. A lot of them have impressions based on exposure to versions 10 years or more ago and they have no clue to how things have progressed.
19th January 2007: 'Dennis Byron' said:
Robin, your post and the comments to it raised an interesting research question, the answer to which I am going to try to track down within Microsoft.
No, Microsoft doesn't have 100% of the Office market. But I bet it has well north of 50%, which is why courts all over the US ruled they have an illegal monopoly. As you might remember, for its punishment Microsoft had to give out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free hardware and software (in the form of vouchers), half of the value of which went to education. The teacher Pogson might have received some of those vouchers, depending on where he or she teaches, but most of the voucher deals I saw precluded a thin-client arrangment like Pogson describes (not even for an NT system). In most cases, the vouchers could be used for any PCs, tablets or laptops, including Macs, and for any software title (whether or not it was Microsoft brand) as long as it ran on the PC, tablet or laptop.
So the question to Redmond: what did folks redeem the anti-trust-suit vouchers for? Sorry, Pogson, but my guess is that Microsoft wins even when it loses: I bet a lot of the vouchers paid for the XP systems in classrooms that you are seeing. I'll post if I find out the answer.
Dennis Byron, IT Investment Research
21st January 2007: 'troub' said:
Robin, Robin, FLOSS will grow in 2007 beyond your expectations. From C/Net early in 2006: "A January report by Evans Data found that the number of applications that run using MySQL grew 30 percent last year..." A separate Evans Data research report showed more adoption by developers.
Another example is a education content management application called Moodle. In January of 2006 the number of sites 7000 was in 142 countries with over 1.6 million users in 160,000 courses. Moodle has grown to over 8 million users and almost 800,000 courses.
Open Source is growing far faster than expectation. Please do some real research before you write another article.
21st January 2007: 'Wendell Anderson' said:
Robin,
Thanks for a well thought out and fact based perspective of Free/Open Source for 2006. I agree fully that it is futile and not appropriate to compare the adoption and use of FOSS directly to commercial software and technology, and also see steady, meaningful adoption in many sectors of industry, government and especially academia.
Please continue to provide us - the technology public - with more worthwhile and sensible commentary.
23rd January 2007: 'vdb' said:
I think that adoption can gain strength for smaller projects if they are teamed with an existing project. We released Shine Live Help to integrate with SugarCRM. The teaming of two separate products at any level of project will really build both the value and the communities.
9th February 2007: 'Seth Grimes' said:
EnterpriseDB is NOT open source. I explain more here . (Note that this is a comment on company-encouraged misperceptions and not on the value of the product or the company's contribution to the underlying PostgreSQL DBMS.)
The messages above were all contributed by IT-Director.com readers. Whilst we take care to remove any posts deemed inappropriate, we can take no responsibility for these comments. If you would like a comment removed please contact our editorial team.