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May 18, 2009

Recent numbers from IDC reveal that CIOs allocated up to 24 percent of their IT budgets to open-source software last year.

This represents an increase of a little over 9.96 percent from the previous numbers released in 2007, a finding that pretty much agrees with recent data from rival Forrester Research.

Such an increase in the growth of the open-source model is pushing Red Hat to grow at two to three times the rate of the broader software industry over a multiyear horizon, according to a study performed by Piper Jaffray.

If you look at the most successful open-source businesses today, none of them pass the ideologues' unrealistic and counterproductive "100-percent freedom" litmus test.

Red Hat is a perfect example of "free done right," following analysis from TechDirt. We've moved beyond the business models that insist that every line of software be open source. They simply couldn't scale and tended to treat openness as an end in and of itself, rather than as a means to an end.

For its part to the Linux and open source community, Google does a large amount of good, yet took a beating last week for not being open source "enough" on the Open Source Initiative's mailing list.

Google's open-source initiative manager, Chris DiBona says "I can see how people would think that Android and Chrome aren't real open source software. But that's certainly a foolish assertion."

The software industry has been positively embracing a broader definition for open-source business that includes many different ways to contribute to and profit from this interesting development.

The "give-away-the-software-but-sell-the-support" business model was always doomed to scale poorly and consigns its adherents to minimal relevance to the wider software market.

It will be interesting to see if the numbers from IDC and Forrester continue to increase for this year and next. Nevertheless, it is generally agreed that the overall level of interest in the open source community is expanding, led mostly by the Linux movement.

Source: IDC.

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