Open source has emerged as one of the most important IT movements in recent times. IDC said “Open Source is the most significant all-encompassing and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980’s.” Evidence of this can be seen in all sectors, for example the UK government has defined a policy that aims to deliver value for money by ensuring that procurement in the public sector considers open source alongside closed source as well as ensuring that software resulting from publicly funded research is sustained through commercialisation and/or open source licensing.
The for-profit sector is adopting open source even more readily. Gartner predict that “By 2012, 80 per cent of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology.” This figure was revised, within two months to 90%, whilst IDC believes that open source will eventually play a role in the life-cycle of every major software category, and will fundamentally change the value proposition of packaged software for customers.
A survey of nearly 1000 IT staff in the UK, Germany, France and North America, commissioned by Actuate, showed that fifty four percent of businesses in the UK felt that the benefits of open source outweighed any negative aspects, a significant increase over forty five percent last year. This upward trend appears to be based on experience rather than expectations with forty three percent of responding businesses in the UK already using open source, whilst six in ten French and German firms do so. Similarly, the above mentioned IDC study finds that of the 5,000 survey respondents, open source software is in production at fifty four percent of their organisations.
Even Microsoft, historically one of the most vocal opposers of the open source movement, has been using open source components since Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition using open source components since Windows 2000. Today open source related announcements come from Microsoft on a regular basis. For example, Microsoft has recently been engaging directly with a variety of open source development projects. In addition they have had two open source licences approved by the Open Source Initiative. Microsoft now hosts and releases software under those licences.
Another of Gartners top predictions for 2008 is that “by 2012, at least one-third of business application software spending will be as a service subscription instead of as a product licence”. The service subscription model is one of the most commonly found open source business models. For example, it is the main revenue generator in Sun Microsystems business model (Sun recently acquired MySQL, another open source business, for $1B).
However, all is not well in this increasingly open future. Research conducted for Actuate found that six in every ten respondents said there “were serious problems finding the right IT skills to implement and manage open source solutions”. As more open source is adopted across all sectors this skills shortage will become more acute since there are currently very few educational or training organisations offering courses that focus on open source, open standards and open development.
The reason for this lack of skills development is simple. The people who understand “open” are able to command higher than average salaries due to the scarcity of skills which makes training necessary. Consequently, there is a shortage of teachers and trainers ensuring new graduates and existing staff have the open source related skills required by employers. The majority of those who genuinely understand open source licencing, development and deployment are too busy earning high incomes by helping companies realise the benefits of an open source strategy.
OSS Watch are currently building a network of organisations and individuals interested in tackling the open source skills problem. It is our intention to create a comprehensive set of freely available training materials. We also hope to provide a supportive infrastructure to maintain and deliver these materials in a variety of situations such as workbased learning and formal education.
If your organisation is interested in such activities please contact us.
Microsoft using Open Source started before 2003. There were BSD-based networking utilities back in Windows 2000 and maybe earlier versions. See, for one example of many, http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=BSD+Code+in+Windows
Thanks for the link MJ Ray. I was aware of the Win 2000 use but needed a reference that was officially acknowledged by MS. However, I do have an instance of Win2000 and thus I have been able to confirm the report in your linked resource.
I’ve updated the article accordingly.