90 percent of SaaS providers to use open source by 2010
Gartner seems to have checked its former open-source blindness at the door, and is now suggesting that 90 percent of all software-as-a-service providers will adopt open source in their infrastructure by 2010.
Cost cutting will lead to the move, said (Gartner)...Open source will be used in the operating system, application server, and at a database level and will make up 30 percent of an application.
Of course it will. Open source is the foundation of software innovation in the 21st century.
One big question remains, however: will open source provide SaaS' free lunch or will there be a quid pro quo? With AGPL and the Open Software License, it will be the latter. With 20th century open-source licenses, however, SaaS gets a free ride.
The more open-source software we want, the more open-source software we should be prepared to pay for, whether in cash or contributions. This is a fair exchange, and will provide the basis for a robust SaaS software economy for many, many years to come.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
