Open Source is the 'software establishment', report says

A new report examining trends in the open source market says more and more organizations are jumping on FOSS, for more reasons than just the price tag.

IT researcher the Standish Group released the report which surveyed participants over five years, and claims “the Open Source movement is no longer the anti-software-industry establishment... Open Source software is the software establishment!”

Though measuring the Open Source market can prove difficult, Standish’s research estimates Open Source software will save users upwards of US$60 billion annually.

In general, Standish found that an increasing number of users believe Open Source software to be more secure, better quality, and more reliable than its commercial counterparts.

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Will market reject Sun’s open source vision?

Matt asks today whether open source will save Sun Microsystems.

Good question. But it depends on what we mean by open source. (Copies of this lovely poster are for sale at eBay.) And what we mean by saving.

As I noted here in January, while Sun sits at the bottom of the open source incline, having embraced GPL licensing, it actually sits near the top of the open source development incline.

This means Sun’s projects are essentially proprietary efforts. Sun decides the strategy, Sun controls the code releases. Sun “owns” mySQL, and takes that ownership seriously.

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Microsoft Uses Open Source To Extend Systems Management To Linux

Microsoft is extending its management software to Linux and Unix by integrating some of the open source OpenPegasus project's code into System Center Operations Manager.

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s management software has never quite measured up to that of Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), IBM (NYSE: IBM), BMC (NYSE: BMC), or CA (NYSE: CA), the "big four" of IT systems management. But the company hopes to begin changing minds about that at the annual Microsoft Management Summit this week, and much of the impetus comes from a rather unlikely place: the integration of open source code into a System Center management product.

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced that it's extending its management software to Linux and Unix environments by integrating some of the open source OpenPegasus project's code into System Center Operations Manager, and will contribute back. The addition of cross-operating system management, the number one customer request for System Center, represents further recognition by Microsoft that it's not a Windows-only world. It also is a significant move toward putting Microsoft on equal footing as a legitimate enterprise management vendor.

"I don't care what enterprise you walk into, they're not going to be single platform. You just don't see that," said Clear Channel solution architect Curt Smith, a System Center customer, in an interview. Clear Channel uses Linux to operate its radio Web platform, has a bunch of creative employees on Apple OS X, and uses VMware for virtualization. "I want the ability to manage it all from one spot. You can't have a bunch of tools all over the place, or else you'll just end up cracking up."

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