Standalone OSS revenue to reach $4.83 billion by 2012

Matt Lawton, director of Open Source Software Business Strategies at IDC, sent me over some details from its latest report on Open Source. I have a few of the details below, and Matt really wanted me to remind everyone that open-source software is being used in so many more ways than straight standalone commercial product deployments and that the standalone $1.73 billion for 2007 is just one component.

The market for standalone open-source software (OSS) continues to be in a significant growth stage. This IDC study outlines the evolution of worldwide revenue from standalone OSS and presents IDC's preliminary 2008--2012 forecast. Some of the highlights from this study are as follows:
--IDC expects worldwide revenue from standalone OSS to grow at a 23 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach $4.83 billion by 2012.
--Worldwide revenue from standalone OSS in 2007 was $1.73 billion.

This forecast is characterized by two different components: revenue from new OSS projects growing at 32 percent CAGR over the forecast period, and revenue associated with a single OSS project (OpenSolaris) that is based on a formerly proprietary software product with a substantial revenue stream but lower growth profile.

Revenue from standalone OSS is an important but small indicator of the commercial impact of OSS. Large vendors are realizing significant revenues indirectly from their activities with and support of OSS. In addition, as unpaid OSS adoption extends from a development environment to production deployments, vendors of competitive proprietary software will feel the impact on their revenues.