Open source innovation continues to impress
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23 June 2006
The software industry’s love affair with open source is not one that is about to end anytime soon.
A study of around 5,000 developers across 116 countries by IT analyst group IDC, concludes that open source is the biggest thing the software industry has seen since the early 1980s, with business developers worldwide progressively increasing their use of open source.
Just over 70% of those questioned currently use open source software within their organisation; and 54% said open source was part of production applications. IDC predicts that the free software will continue to experience major take-up over the next decade and eventually play a role in every major software category.
The highest profile open source products today – such as Apache, Linux and MySQL – sit alongside hundreds of others fulfilling niche requirements – “the long tail of the software industry”, in IDC’s words.
Its analysts say that the absence of licence fees that characterises open source will increasingly be of less significance to users, coming second to the role of open source in software innovation.
