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Open Source: Commercial Software Loses Ground
Open Source is now a competitive mainstream alternative for many business applications and the rise of Open Source is becoming a threat to proprietary software.
A decade ago, Open Source was not well understood and considered by many organizations to be too risky to even be considered as an option. Today, success by well-recognized Open Source product brands like RedHat, MySQL and Alfresco have totally changed people’s perspectives about Open Source. Linux has become a sort of poster-child success story for Open Source. Key selling points of Open Source have been less vendor lock-in and more flexibility in software customization.
Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner, described the results of a survey on Open Source taken by Gartner in the Harvard Business Journal. She found that across the total sum of all organizations, Open Source platforms account for 29 percent of software portfolios. Organizations responded that they are using Open Source in the following way:
- 46 percent of organizations use Open Source Software at the departmental or project level
- 22 percent of organizations consistently use Open Source Software in all departments
- 21 percent of organizations are in the process of evaluating the advantages of using Open Source Software
But despite the inroads that Open Source has made across many organizations, the Gartner survey finds that while many people have a better understanding of Open Source, the biggest impediment to Open Source adoption remains confusion because most organizations still don’t have any formal policies around the use of Open Source.
The flip side to the success of Open Source is the worry that it creates for developers employed in commercial software development.
One area where Open Source has had a devastating effect on commercial software is in the area of Java application servers. Open Source options have resulted in a complete commoditization of this market segment. A survey by New Relic found that 54 percent of enterprises now use Apache Tomcat. 16 percent are using Jetty, and 9 percent are using JBoss. IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic each have only about 1 percent each of market share.
