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

The future apparently includes the heavy adoption of open source at the core of commercial software so developers can focus on pushing the envelope on innovation.

[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