Open source trends

Since some folks may have missed this posting over the holidays, I've reposted it this week...

There's been quite a few good posts recently on trends and observations around open source. Here's my quick take on five trends that I expect will become more significant in 2009.

More commercial open source
As Dave Rosenberg has deftly pointed out, open source has become more commercial with the traditional view that you could give away software and sell support now being supplanted. CIOs and CTOs are a pragmatic bunch, and they aren't going to pay for support just because vendors ask for it; they'll pay for things that add value to their operations. My personal view is that for any trend or technology to be sustainable, it needs to be commercial -- which leads to the next trend...

More experimentation with business models
While Red Hat has been successful with its enterprise subscription model, there are many variations in the industry. Companies like Alfresco, Pentaho, SugarCRM, and MySQL all have their own unique way of doing things. At MySQL, the core server is completely open source, but there are additional capabilities delivered as part of the subscription. Others, like Pentaho and SugarCRM, have closed source features in their enterprise product. I believe there will be more and more experimentation in business models in the next year as companies determine exactly what provides the right incentive or add value for users to become paying customers.

More acquisitions
Early in 2008, Sun acquired MySQL for $1 billion, and many speculated that there would be a wave of acquisitions. But in fact, other than some fairly modest size deals, open source acquisitions more or less ground down to a halt as the M&A market tanked along with the stock market. As the market levels off and stabilizes, I suspect we will see renewed interest in this area. For companies with a strong balance sheet, it's a great opportunity to buy.

More power in the user community
Despite the rise of commercialism in open source (not that I think that's a bad thing). I suspect there will be an equally significant increase in power among open source users in the community. Note that I don't mean the usual T-shirt-wearing OSCON attendees, but rather every day users inside of corporate IT departments. As open source becomes more widespread in corporations, IT users are going to weigh in more in open source projects to make sure that they have a voice in what's important to them. Most open source companies have corporate advisory boards where large customers can help guide the product road maps. I expect that trend will continue.

More mainstream
The most fundamental trend is that open source continues to be more and more of the core fabric of IT, especially at the operating system, middleware, and database layers. Gartner reports open source database adoption growing at 50 percent over last year. I can't think of a single startup that is being built on proprietary software. More and more companies are using open source as a way to control their expenses. If it's good enough for the likes of Google, Alcatel, Nokia, Associated Press, then why not? In a tough economic climate, it certainly makes sense to evaluate open source alternatives.

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