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Open Source: Customers Care about Patents — or do they?
A couple of recent articles review the content of some conference calls made with Matthew Lawton of IDC. In a parallel article from SearchEnterpriseLinux.com, Lawton discussed Linux, Open Source and Virtualization. In an article by internetnews.com, Lawton goes into the details of Open Source, patents and indemnification. It isn’t clear if the two conference calls were the same.
SearchEnterpriseLinux reports Lawton referring to an IDC report from earlier in 2007 that analyzes the criteria used by IT managers in making decisions about Open Source adoption. Managers valued functionality, scalability and reliability the most. “The ones at the bottom of the list were protection from vendor lock-in, indemnification concerns, source code access and the ability to redistribute code.”
In the internetnews.com story, Lawton says, “The potential for copyright and patent infringement is the number one inhibitor right now for organizations in adopting more open source software in their organization. Close behind that is the availability of support.”
Despite those seemingly contradictory statements, what is consistent, is the idea that Open Source is high on people’s list of things to consider because of the perceived lower costs related to deployment and long-term cost of ownership of the software.
Lawton looks ahead five years and sees infrastructure software like Linux and MySQL remaining the biggest segments where Open Source is used. But he expects that there will be inroads made from Open Source development, reporting tools and application software.
