Open Source Growing in the Mainstream

Gartner is saying that elements of open-source technology will be present in 80 percent of all commercial software by 2012.

Doug Caverly at WebPronews reports:

We’ve already seen a few large corporations take a few small steps - Facebook, Google, and Microsoft recently joined DataPortability.org, for example. And as time goes by, more of these little developments could take place, until a sort of snowball effect (born out of a desire to avoid that “serious competitive disadvantage”) occurs.

Or not - Gartner could be wrong. But the company indicated that, on the subject of open-source technology, it might actually be underestimating growth, writing, “Embedded open source strategies will become the minimal level of investment that most large software vendors will find necessary to maintain competitive advantages during the next five years.”

On a related note, IBM announced a deal today with Avada teaming up on open source application servers.