In the final hours of 2008, Roger Burkhardt, president and CEO of Ingres, shared his predictions about the future of open source.
Here are summaries of his predictions:
- As the economy worsens, adoption of open source software will increase .
- Open source adoption will accelerate across the full infrastructure software stack and into applications.
- SaaS and cloud computing solutions will grow and pull open source with it.
- Mergers and acquisitions of open source vendors will continue.
- Competition from open source will drive proprietary software vendors to take the first steps in changing their business models.
- Open source stacks will emerge from strong market partnerships.
- Systems integrators will guarantee first-year cost savings for migrations to open source.
For the most part, I’m with him. As budgets tighten, it only makes sense that “free” will flourish. We hear that consumers are only looking for sales these days, so why wouldn’t companies? With this increase generally, and as more acceptance and trust of open source occurs, it seems natural that it will extend through the stack and through more applications (e.g., Vyatta has been busy releasing three open source networking appliances in 2008). And perhaps the upside of a down job market is that some programmers, with free time on their hands, can finish projects they had on the back burner. In 2008, we heard a lot of buzz about the cloud, and this cost-conscious computing model pairs well with open source. If you buy the cloud hype, you can easily see the increased opportunity for open source adoption that it provides.
We know that open source gained ground in the enterprise, and we even saw major proprietary software vendors change their tune (if not their business models) — ceding some ground to open source devotees.
What are your predictions for open source? Share them below or make your case against Burkhardt’s divinations.