I was interested by some comments from Anthony Picardi, IDC’s senior vice president of global software research, quoted in Linux-Watch

…open source-software is being used by 71 percent of the developers in the world and is in production at 54 percent of their organizations. In addition, half of the global developers claim that the use of open source is increasing in their organizations.

Picardi goes on to say

The real impact of open source is to sustain innovations in mature software markets, thus extending the useful life of software assets and saving customers money … Open source software is ultimately a resource for sustaining innovators.

There’s more in the full report, but unfortunately IDC (“the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets“) wants USD 3,500 from you before they’ll let you read it.

This is no problem for their intended audience: corporate customers who think nothing of paying USD 3,500 for a 29 page report. These companies are happy to spend tens of millions of USD per annum on commodity software which doesn’t buy them any competitive advantage. They aren’t going to be too worried about paying USD 3,500 to be told something that was blatantly obvious to their predecessors fifty years ago.

Open-source is an economic imperative for corporates as software becomes a commodity. The only question is: for how long can the huge marketing budgets of Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, et al keep the elephant hidden in the living room?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 6th, 2006 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Open-source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.