The TeleInterActive Lifestyle

For a different take on The Leadership Forum "Emerging Opportunities in Open Source Technologies" seminar, take a look at "Has Open Source Found a Reliable Business Model".

"One prediction has the proprietary software vendors seriously challenged to remain profitable within 5 years. This observer finds that hard to believe, since Open Source link has been around for many years and the only serious challenger observed so far appears to be around operating systems DOS vs Linux."

-- Alex Fiteni, Has Open Source Found a Reliable Business Model, 2005 June 07

I agree that wiki(Open Source) has been around for years, with operating systems like NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and other such projects starting the trend [though Netscape releasing source in 1998, and later becoming Mozilla coined the term]. I disagree that the only serious open source challenger is Linux. Open Source projects that don't involve a new flavour of Linux have been very successful. In addition to the three flavours of BSD, we have non-OS projects such as

• Apache Web Server,
• FireFox,
• Jabber,
• MySQL,
• PostgreSQL,
• JBoss,
• Orion,
• GAIM,
• Filezilla,
• WinMerge, spamAssassin,
• phpESP, and
• of course, the software that runs this blog, b2evolution;

There are also some very interesting up and coming enterprise software such as Compiere and SugarCRM, and SourceForge recently announcing that they have passed the 100,000 mark.

Alex Fiteni does conclude that

"OpenSource is here to stay. It has proven itself resilient over time."

He also refers to Bernard Golden and his Open Source Maturity Model as the help CIO's need to properly select among Open Source projects.