More MS, Less Talent In Open Source's Future

alphadogg writes "The open source industry in 2008 will be marked by more news out of Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and other big IT vendors, less start-up funding, more M&A activity, and an increasingly serious talent shortage, according to Raven Zachary, open source research director for The 451 Group. One example of the talent shortage will be people with expertise in the Tomcat open source Java servlet middleware from the Apache Foundation. 'There are 25 or so core contributors to that project,' Zachary said. 'Over the past four or five years that number has stayed virtually [unchanged]... but the growth of Tomcat has been astronomical.'"

Comments

Re:Talent shortage?

[wizardforce]

it is however a sustainable model that doesn't normally alienate your user base like Microsft's business model does. You don't get bad PR from treating your user base like criminals, they jsut get to use the software as they like, you get a sustainable cash flow that doesn't require you to spend a great deal of it attacking your user base for daring to actually use your software. it is by design, favorable for that software to get copied as many times as is possible, more eyes to help improve the code and make it better over time as well as future support.