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.

Comments

Already here.

[Aladrin]

The article says that some say that day is already here. I agree.

Try to do -anything- on the web without having to deal with Firefox, Apache, PHP, etc, etc... Good freaking luck. Even Safari uses open source components, so there goes all compatibility with Mac as well. (Meaning you can't test it on Mac, because then you'd be dealing with open source.)

Now, try to have a successful business without the internet. Sure, it's possible on a small scale, but I can't name a single business I deal with that doesn't have at least a 'contact us' page on the internet with a phone number.

And that doesn't even get into interacting with other companies that happily use open source in their daily functioning.

Consider the Source

[FatMacDaddy]

This is the Gartner Group we're talking about. The only thing that amazes me is that anyone still pays them any attention at all. I still have some presentation materials around here somewhere where they warn that 30% of US businesses will fail due to Y2K problems.

Oh but you can...

[Kadin2048]

Actually, I have found that the amount of open source you use and your chances of getting herpes are, strangely, inversely proportional. ;)