Gartner: Most commercial apps to embed open source by '12

Gartner has made 10 technology predictions for the next few years, and in the analyst firm's view, life has never been better for open source.

Among the predictions: Apple will double its market share by 2011 and software-as-service will account for at least one-third of all business software spending by 2012.

But it was open source's gain that I found most interesting. Gartner doesn't speculate on how much open-source vendors will make or anything like that. Rather, Gartner talks about how much open-source code will make it into those bastions of proprietary, so-called "commercial software":

By 2012, 80 percent of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology. Many open-source technologies are mature, stable and well supported. They provide significant opportunities for vendors and users to lower their total cost of ownership and increase returns on investment.

Ignoring this will put companies at a serious competitive disadvantage. Embedded open source strategies will become the minimal level of investment that most large software vendors will find necessary to maintain competitive advantages during the next five years.

Let's be clear. We're talking about Microsoft Windows...Oracle databases...SAP's ERP suite...and so on. Many of these companies already embed open source in their products but don't like to admit it (in Microsoft's case) or make noise about it. Market pressures will force them to stop pretending to be the source of all innovation and to "outsource" ever-growing amounts of their R&D resources to mining the best open source has to offer.

I can speak from experience that building on open-source technologies truly does lower the cost of development. Alfresco--the company I work for--went from zero lines of code to a product that had several Fortune 500 customers in just six months. We were able to leverage the strength of open-source projects like Spring, Lucene, and OpenOffice.

This is what the future looks like: heavy adoption of open source at the core of commercial software so developers can focus on pushing the envelope on innovation, not reinventing wheels that provide no discernible differentiation.

[tristanbob]

This brings up several questions. Will any of this embedded software be GPL? If so, how can these commercial companies embed it with their product? Perhaps they will purchase licenses from open source vendors who use dual license business models. For instance, if someone wanted to create a specialized phone system, they could purchase a license from Digium for Asterisk and use it as the foundation for their product.

GPL is the most popular license, but it does not mix well with proprietary software. Does this mean that proprietary companies in 2012 will be using non-copyleft licenses like BSD or Apache?

Tristan Rhodes

[cbibbs]

Open Source licenses mix just fine with commercial software in the majority of cases. I work in a large software company and I'd say that with the exception of our mainframe products, all of them have some Open Source in them.

If you have the need for encrypting your traffic and communicating with other vendor's offerings, you're going to use SSL. Specifically, you're going to use OpenSSL.

Most other Open Source projects that get used are also library functions that get licensed under similar non-restrictive licenses. Don't change their code, mention the project in your documentation. Boom, you're done.

[botchagalupe]

Gartner predictions are analogous to banks and startup companies. A bank will offer a startup a iine of credit nano-seconds before the company doesn't need it. Alas, Gatner makes 80% predictions a nano-second before everyone else is convinced it is already true.

johnmwillis.com

[xapeters]

Wow. It looks like Gartner Group finally got something right about Open Source Software.

www.xaware.org >

[mbleasdale]

Embedded open source is a big challenge for many organzations worldwide that are currently using GPLv2. Whether they are aware they are using or not is a separate issue. We find that undocumented code (such as that which is embedded) is the code that poses the most risk - business, legal and security - to organizations. The use of open source is an excellent business decision for many reasons, not the least of which is its cost-effective and collaborative nature. However, companies often have no idea how much open source they are actually using, where it's located, whether or not it's licensed under something they can redistribute, and importantly, whether it's secure.

Though pretty much every open source project patches and posts a fix to any security issues found, there are legions of developers that have already grabbed the unpatched version of a project, dropped it into an app, and moved on. This makes sense of course but not having a mechanism with which to scan and double-check OSS for license and security issues is tantamount to gambling. You wouldn't take vendor software into your infrastructure without vetting it first, why do it with open source?

Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale, Palamida