The 2009 report on 'Future of Open source' by North Bridge Venture Partners shared at the InfoWorld's Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), re-confirms the trend towards increasing adoption of open source, particular in the enterprise. Following are the key findings collected from 435 respondents
- Approximately 96 percent of respondents feel the economy's turbulence is "good" for open source software, up from 81 percent in 2008.
- Almost 80% of respondents believe that open source software will make up greater than 25% of the software purchased in their organization.
- Respondents revealed that the top four factors that make open source software attractive include: lower acquisition and maintenance costs; superior security; freedom from vendor lock-in; and better quality software.
- The sectors expected to be most susceptible to disruption by open source software in the next five years include: database, operating systems, business intelligence and web content management.
- The sectors expected to be least susceptible to disruption by open source software in the next five years include: office productivity, security tools, and ERP/CRM.
- Respondents listed unfamiliarity with open source solutions, lack of internal technical skills, and lack of formal commercial vendor support as the top three barriers to the selection of open source software.
- The business strategies predicted to create the most value for open source vendors include subscription based technical support and professional services and consulting.
Pay particular attention to the 6th bullet above. Lack of open source skills continues to be a bottle neck. This familiar line keeps popping up so regularly that many of us tend to treat it as a matter of fact or time. However, with all the openness of open source how does this as a challenge compare to the proprietary technologies from proprietary vendors? Surely companies are not born with that kind of expertise. What open source needs here is something that proprietary vendors have perfected long ago - proactive training and eduction to make skills easily available. It is perhaps time for open source vendors (especially the ones with commercial offerings) to broaden their approach to include training as a longer term strategy than feeling opportunistic about the current recession.
But why hasn't such an obvious time tested thing happened to open source?
Thinking aloud here I see this as a result of perhaps ....
- Openness: A continued belief that openness by itself is a good enough training effort. After all so many could get started without any additional inputs. This is showing signs of change in a very limited way with communities such as Mozilla foundation taking lead in education
- Barriers to entry: A phenomenal growth of open source in terms of shear code base and complexity over the last several years. This makes it difficult for the uninitiated / faint hearted to jump in - who on a given day would happily settle down with a canned training session on proprietary software over diving into unknown waters
- Economics: Realistically the cost effective option of open source also means that vendors dealing with open source have less at disposal to spend on initiatives that aren't likely to generate cash soon enough. Training and education does not come cheap
Won't it be nice to see a community effort towards training and education for the benefit of open source adoption? Can Kenfuse as a collaborative education platform help here?