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Open Source: Shift from Skepticism to Enthusiasm
Two years ago many companies were skeptical of Open Source, but after living two years through tough times during a recession, many companies have a better handle on what Open Source is all about and are enthusiastically embracing its potential. And the new mind shift among customers is forcing many vendors to change. They’re changing the way that they sell. And they’re changing the way that they develop with and support their software purchases.
Jeffrey Hammond, analyst at Forrester Research, said at the Open Source Business Conference: “What’s happening is we’re seeing the move in enterprise software from a price skimming model (where companies make lots of money, but have very few customers) to a price-penetration model, where it is easy to acquire, easy to install, and it becomes a community.” The high license fees of commercial software and the plateau or decline in technology budgets has force many companies to consider Open Source, and once they’ve come to understand Open Source more, they get hooked on the model.
Now customers aren’t trying to figure out what Open Source is, they’ve moved on to trying to figure out what are Best Practices around the use of Open Source.
Interesting too is that a higher proportion of Open Source products are being written using dynamic scripting languages like PHP and Ruby. The get-up-to-speed time for products in these languages is much quicker. The gain in popularity of Open Source is translating to a gradual loss of interest in languages like Java and .Net. Part of the change is being driven by a younger demographic for developers, many of whom prefer dynamic languages. Matt Asay calls it a ‘youthquake’ happening in the developer world.
