Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

According to a survey on the future of Open Source software, the current less-than promising economic climate should be good for open source software. This is among a number of findings by the 2008 Future of Open Source survey led by North Bridge Venture Partners in partnership with Acquia, Ingres, SugarCRM, Sun and Ubuntu.

According to this survey 81% if the respondents believe that “economic turbulence” indices business to look around at more alternatives in order to save money, and those other alternatives will include Open Source software. Therefore, while the current downturn may be bad for commercial software companies, it may be very good for the groups that produce Open Source software.

Further survey respondents hold the following views:

• The takers of the survey say that the top three factors that make open source software attractive are lower acquisition and maintenance costs; flexibility/access to libraries of community-developed code; and freedom from vendor lock-in
• More than 55 percent of them believe that in five years 25-50 percent of purchased software will be open source vs. proprietary
• They believe that Web Publishing/Content Management market is expected to be most vulnerable to disruption by open source in the next five years
• Respondents expect the security utilities market be least vulnerable to disruption by open source in the next five years

Take a look at the survey results for more details.