[LINK] 7 out of 10 developers use open source

[Kim Holburn]

http://blogs.cio.com/node/440

> IDC surveyed 5000 developers in 116 countries and discovered that  
> open source is used by 71% of them and -- perhaps more surprisingly  
> -- is used in 54% of their production environments.

> These organizations are leveraging open source to get their work  
> done faster, cheaper, and with more control. This clearly  
> represents a revolution in how IT operates.

> In a world of expensive, inflexible software, only the most  
> conservative, obvious-payoff projects get funded. In the new world  
> of open source, companies can experiment, develop prototypes on the  
> cheap, and inexpensively scale the winners. To understand this  
> dynamic, look at the Web 2.0 companies. I don't necessarily believe  
> that most of them have a sustainable business at their core -- but  
> that's not important. What they represent is a totally different  
> way of getting Internet businesses off the ground. What Flickr,  
> YouTube, and a hundred other companies have in common is that they  
> leverage cheap hosting, open source software, and commodity  
> hardware to get going -- without a cent of venture capital. Put in  
> language that we all use: they delivered applications without  
> having to make capex investment or even use much operational budget.
>
> Seeing open source as the lower-cost alternative to traditional  
> software categories is to miss the enormous effect it's going to  
> have on the industry. What open source does is to completely change  
> the economics of IT projects. Viewing the importance of a new  
> product type as how it will affect incumbents and established  
> working practices is the long-honored mistake of established  
> players, as convincingly described by Clayton Christensen in his  
> books like The Innovator's Dilemma. Time and again established  
> vendors -- and their customers -- have evaluated new technologies  
> by comparing them to existing technologies, typically concluding  
> that they are inadequate, thereby missing the opportunity to take  
> advantage of a new, cheaper way of doing things.
>
> Don't  perceive open source as a cut-price version of what you've  
> already got. Think about what projects you can incubate and perhaps  
> hatch into fledgling new lines of business by leveraging easily  
> available, easily modifiable, low-cost software. Look where you've  
> never looked before -- instead of taking another look at the same  
> old flock of applications.


--
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
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