I know people don’t always believe I have a complete grip on reality but maybe they’ll believe Gartner. According to Gartner Open Source accounted for 13% of the $92.7 billion software market in 2006 and will account for 27% by 2011. They say “Continued acceptance will drive down prices and force proprietary software vendors to change their business model.”
Gartner also declared Open Source software the biggest disruptor the software industry has ever seen. Open Source can mean big bucks! One recent example has been Zimbra who were bought up by Yahoo for $350 million. Zimbra has a dual source licensing strategy where you can have the Open Source version or you can buy their support and enhancements to the product for a fee.
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September 25th, 2007 at 12:38 am
[...] ยป Gartner declares Open Source biggest Disruptor of our time [...]
September 26th, 2007 at 3:51 am
Vijay,
in my personal opinion, Gartner are great at looking backwards and very poor (along with most other analysts) at predicting the future. They must of announced the death of the mainframe several time (it is still going strong), Windows, Vista, Office and more, yet all these are going strong.
I believe analysts for TCO studies (it is all hear and now) and current market thinking / perception, but that is it.
It also seems strange to me that the “Software” industry makes so much money from Open Source. This is not the consultancy part of the IT industry, but people who write software…. surely they can’t be charging for their software…. hmmm… that would mean people are having to pay for it… double hmmm!!!
ttfn
David
September 26th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Dave,
I agree with you that Analysts are very bad at looking into the future. I was a little surprised at the figures myself! What I do know is that Companies like MySQL do have a dual licensing strategy. What we can say is that Open Source is here to stay as part of the Software Industry landscape and VCs will back the right venture. Open Source has changed the strategy of quite a few major Tech players such as Sun (Java and OpenSolaris) and also Microsoft. It depends whether Microsoft sees it as an opportunity and not just the Port25 guys. I know you understand the opportunities, so maybe you can evangelise the use of the Microsoft Stack in Open Source ISV solutions?