Gartner Says Open Source "Impossible To Avoid"

alphadogg writes in with a Network World article that covers a Gartner open source conference, in which VP Mark Driver seems to be going out of his way to be provocative. "You can try to avoid open source, but it's probably easier to get out of the IT business altogether. By 2011, at least 80% of commercial software will contain significant amounts of open source code..." After this lead-in, in which open source seems to be regarded as some kind of communicable disease, the rest of the article outlines a perfectly rational plan for developing an open source strategy.

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Consider the Content.

[Erris]

Driver has no idea what a fanatic he is. Commercial software developers have used BSD and other free software all along, yet he imagines a rational person would be afraid of such things. He then constructs this strawman:

Open source, more than anything else in the industry, has a large set of proponents who border on zealots, he said. Its the guy who says, 'Windows sucks, it doesnt work. Lets throw it out and use Linux.

I wonder if he had to wipe the drool off his chin when he said that.

It's never been a bad idea to consider freedom and there have always been trade offs. Businesses that ignored freedom have been yanked along with the upgrade train, suffered intentional waste and incompetent security. Now that free software has gained a large feature and performance advantage in many areas, non free proponents are abandoning the "best tool for the job" mantra and erecting FUD barriers.

Only a real zealot would think it's impossible, impractical or extreme to replace Windows. Windows itself has always been second rate. Rational people used it because it was cheap, "good enough" and there were useful applications. Many large companies have already done it and rational people now realize that Windows should only be kept around for legacy and specialized niches.