Analyst Admits Open Source Will Quietly Take Over

ZDOne writes "In a few years' time, almost all businesses will use open source, according to analyst Gartner — which has up to now been fairly cautious, or downright negative, in its previous predictions about community developed software. '"By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms,' predicts a Gartner report, The State of Open Source 2008, which sees a 'stealth' impact for the technology in embedded form: "Users who reject open source for technical, legal or business reasons might find themselves unintentionally using open source despite their opposition.'"

Comments

Use != Take Over

[timeOday]

Every enterprise "using" something just means it has over 0% penetration. Just because somebody in the company scripts in Perl (which is open source) doesn't mean it's taking over.

Re:There's no advantage to propietary

[TooMuchToDo]

You would write off strippers and booze under the "Entertainment" portion of your taxes. Keep receipts =)

Complete report

[Selanit]

The linked blog article is okay if you want a summary, but if you'd prefer, you can check out the complete document. Here's a PDF link to Gartner's full analysis: The State of Open Source 2008.

Re:That's Positive? Positively clueless.

[Anonymous Coward]

The AC you're responding is a Microsoft employee/evangelism team with several sockpuppet accounts.

Most commonly used are;

• Macthorpe
• renegadesx
• dedazo
• DAldredge

though there are others.

Gartner seems way behind the times on this one.

[Mongoose Disciple]

I'm a consultant, so I tend to be exposed to a lot of different non-software companies in a given year. Which is to say, companies that use computers and software to solve the problems of their business and not as their primary product.

All of them are running Windows and Office on just about every machine they have.

However, most of them are also using at least one Open Source tool to fill some need. For many of them, that's something like Subversion running on a Windows server and Tortoise installs for the devs to go with it, but still, they're using it.

Re:Heck, even Microsoft runs its wireless on Linux

[t1n0m3n]

The Aruba access points do not run linux. The Aruba mobility controllers do though.

Re:That's Positive? Positively clueless.

[mpe]

While "free equally worthless" is a common fallacy, there are other reasons to want proprietary code. I, for one, want a company to be held responsible for bugs in the code I use.

Good luck trying that with a typical piece of proprietary software. In order to stand any chance of doing this you'd need to take the company to court and win.

If there's a bug I want to be able to outsource the patch in the form of paying for it.

Which is something you can easily do with open source. With proprietary software you face both technical and legal issues even trying.

Where do they say "take over"? (but, Dr Evil...)

[argent]

There's nothing in the linked article that implies Gartner said anything about open source "taking over".

"By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms," predicts a Gartner report, The State of Open Source 2008, which sees a "stealth" impact for the technology in embedded form: "Users who reject open source for technical, legal or business reasons might find themselves unintentionally using open source despite their opposition."

A company may have 3000 Windows systems running Office and one Linux-based router, and they will be 'using open source in direct or embedded form'.

Except that they're too late. I doubt there's a business in America that isn't using open source, one way or another. Even if they have nothing but Windows in-house:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\finger.exe: (#) Copyright (c) 1980 The Regents of the University of California.
C:\WINDOWS\system32\ftp.exe: (#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
C:\WINDOWS\system32\nslookup.exe: (#) Copyright (c) 1985,1989 Regents of the University of California.
C:\WINDOWS\system32\rcp.exe: (#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
C:\WINDOWS\system32\rsh.exe: (#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
C:\WINDOWS\system32\vmnetdhcp.exe: $Id: inet_addr.c,v 1.1.1.1 1999/11/22 00:57:05 edward Exp $ Copyright (c) 1983, 1990, 1993 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

(oh, and what the hell are the "technical, business, or legal reasons" to reject open source?)

Re:That's Positive? Positively clueless.

[jayp00001]

After a while, though, it turns around. Frustration sets in, for the Windows user as well as for the VB programmer. A lot of the things you want to do simply don't work. Or are hard to pull off. You start to see the shortcomings in your OS (or language), you look over to the other guy and see how easily he can pull off what would be a major feat for you (try to do a full HD backup and compress it at the same time in Windows, something that's a very trivial matter with dd and bzip in Linux, or compare it to any kind of pointer operation in the programming analogy).

You start being pissed at your system (or language), you start envying the guy you belittled earlier for his choice of the "needlessly complex" tool. And generally, you'll be dissatisfied in the long run.

Your "shortcomings" come from not understanding the tools available. To use your examples if you wanted to do a full backup and have it use compression- you're in luck- every backup uses compression. Want to do it from the command line but don;t know how? Try "command line backup" under help and support. Want to use pointers in VB. Look at byref, if that's not going to accomplish what you want do a google search for pointers vb ( or vb.net if you prefer) however pointers are inherently unsafe (which is why they are more difficult to implement in VB since there is no real need for them) but they are available should you have to use them to interop with com objects that require pointers.

Linux in general is needlessly complex, to use your example knowing that dd can be used for backups is a battle in itself. googling for "linux backup" dd doesn't make the top 5 hits and one hit from linux magazine (linux backup primer) says "Linux backups can be quite intimidating ..." however I think apple has done an excellent job at making unix useable by grandma.

Re:That's Positive? Positively clueless.

[PitaBred]

Which is why you submit the code back to the original project. Then an upgrade just works. It's not a terribly hard concept to get.

Re:That's Positive? Positively clueless.

[PitaBred]

Wait... you couldn't figure out how to install Flash on Ubuntu 7.10 after TWO HOURS?

The 5th result when you search google for "flash ubuntu 7.10" is this. You read through it, enable the Restricted Repositories in Synaptic, and then just install flash.

I think you may find that this is enlightening. It boils down to this: Linux is NOT Windows. Trying to treat it like Windows sets you up for failure. You don't try to drive your car like you ride your bike, do you?