The market for application development has matured to the point where organisations are willing to consider open source instead of vendor-specific tool sets, Michael Barnes, senior program director at industry analyst META Group, told ZDNet Australia.
"Open source has emerged slowly and organically," Barnes said.
Barnes believes that some organisations have implemented and relied on open source consciously, looking to the potential cost savings and not having to rely on a single vendor. Others, he believes, have done it through purchasing a tool and accepting the open source processes which are part of that product.
One of the reasons Barnes sees for increasing interest in open source is that organisations are becoming more conscious of not becoming overly reliant on one supplier.
Barnes thinks that the interest in open source will keep growing, particularly with what he describes as a hybrid model, where vendors use the basic development environments which are available as open source, which then become a foundation for other tools.
"But there certainly will be, and are, organisations that have consciously chosen open source," he said.
Enterprises need to understand any potential ramifications of its choices, according to Barnes. This may include licensing details, or where to turn if the enterprise has problems, he said.
In the uptake of many technologies, particulary 'disruptive' technologies like the Internet and Linux, there is a point just prior to critical mass being reached, where there is an ever-upwards sloping adoption rate. This appears to be happening now with Linux. A corollary to this story is the recent news leak:
http://www.itnews.com.au/story.cfm?ID=10596
which states that Telstra is seriously considering rolling out 45,000 Linux systems. Now, the likelihood of this happening is slim, but the sheer fact that Telstra's CIO is using Linux and StarOffice by name, should give vendors who do not support Linux and Open Source software, serious pause. This type of announcement would have been impossible just 9 months ago. This is the kind of rate-of-accelleration change that disruptive technologies invoke. A wise person woould not bet against this shift in the market. Whould you?