Some loose coupled assumptions how open source affects the commercial software world:

• The amount of open source code reused inside commercial products has significantly increased the last few years and will gain at least with same speed when not faster in future.
• The ratio of reused open source code vs. self-written code used inside a commercial product is in favour of open source the smaller the company (or the smaller the budget for R&D).
• 100% open source products are getting mainstream and once reached a mature level they can compete in the same league as commercial products
• Although a lot of commercial software vendors already make use of open source code - only a minority is today actively supporting the group where the source is maintained.
• Major open source projects are funded by large commercial software vendors (mostly by assigning dedicated resources into the project). This is going to significantly increase in the next few years.
• On the other side – more and more commercial software vendors make their products open source.

And what happened in 3 years? Are open source projects going to be the shared R&D departments of the commercial software vendors?

Posted by Cedric on Sunday, February 27, 2005 at 2/27/2005 05:00:00 PM | Permalink