Comments on: Open source gains while proprietary software declines

Open source is seeing a greater share of the enterprise software market while proprietary software declines, according to research from Gartner and Forrester.

[ericyen]

With Oracle buying Sun today how has this changed?
The chaos is still working itself out . . . but I don't see alot of Open Source staying open. If they do what is the development push?

[pentest]

This is the power of OSS. They can release a new version under a proprietary license, but they can't rescind it on current GPL code. It ?happened a while back in the security community with Nessus, the company released a new version sans GPL, and it forked(openVas) and guess what many people use now

If they get stupid, a fork will happen.

[kksing]

No need for Oracle to do that...

They will just let it die slowly through neglect. At the moment, I don't see any company willing to invest in the resources required to maintain a forked MySQL.

[odubtaig]

Courtesy of Linux Magazine:

http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

A fork, with funding, with Monty Widenius himself and others of the original team.

I still think Oracle would have to be in some way brain-damaged to not try their best with MySQL but if they don't the alternative is already available.

[Pishkado]

The headline is wrong. It's not that the percentages are rising or falling. It's that they're expected to in the future. Not the same thing. Not hard to get into a headline-sized space, either. Perhaps the writer can fix this.

The trouble with predictions of what one will do next year is that they're influenced by the respondent's perception of what the survey taker, and the world in general, think they ought to do. It's "in" to go OSS rather than proprietary, so that's what CIOs say they'll do - often without realizing why they say it. What they actually do when the time comes, and they have to deal with all the internal and external pressures that don't arise when they're filling out a questionnaire, can be quite different.

I'm not against open source, this may well happen, but we can't

[jessiethe3rd]

Keep pushing the marketing material for Open Source... now that Oracle owns Sun it'll be interesting to see just how "Open" it stays.

[pentest]

Google for the term code fork.

[pentest]

The largest benefit is that each company controls the source. If they need add-on functionality, they are not at the mercy of a company who will likely ignore the request. They can do it themselves internally or hire it out.