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

Echoing beliefs frequently voiced in this column, the Gartner Group also says that Open Source Software is the wave of the future. In a recent Gartner report, it is likely that all businesses will be using Open Source software within a very few years. We have highlighted just a few of the solid reasons behind this trend here so far, featuring just a few of the available high-quality Open Source programs for business, and will be featuring more in the future.

The Gartner report says that “By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms. Users who reject open source for technical, legal or business reasons might find themselves unintentionally using open source despite their opposition." By this Gartner means the use of Open Source in embedded applications, which they see as a “stealth” element to the Open Source revolution.

The report goes on to say, however, that most business will continue to use proprietary software for such mission-critical needs as operating systems and databases. Gartner believes that the cost of using Open Source software for these purposes remains high because of the cost of assets necessary to use them. They go on to say that, "Much of the availability, management and DBMS licensing costs will remain proprietary and version control and incompatibilities will continue to plague open-source OSs and associated middleware".

Mark Taylor, President of the Open Source Consortium, was happy to see Gartner beginning to embrace Open Source but also said, "Gartner has woefully underestimated the penetration of open source. Everyone uses [open source] on a daily basis in services like Google."

On a more specific subject, Taylor had the following to say about the overall benefits of Open Source operating systems like Linux: "There are a range of open-source business models, from a completely proprietary version where open source is used as a sprinkling of magic pixie dust, to a full-on, services-based deployment using a free Linux distribution. Gartner assumes that the pseudo-open proposition will hold sway, but companies change. They may initially need the reassurance of a proprietarized version of Linux but, in our experience, they are then increasingly happy to go to a services model, using a distribution like Debian."