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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.