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Strategies & Market Trends : Heinz Blasnik- Views You Can Use -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GraceZ who wrote (3237)	7/25/2003 2:23:31 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4907

If no one can make money open source will die a slow death This is something that has been stated for some time; however open source continues to grow in popularity, and its use is becoming more and more entrenched in medium and large sized organizations. There have been only a few big dislocations so far. I do expect there to be more. We can use the dominant marketshare of the Apache web server platform as one example where Open Source has dominated an infrastructure segment: news.netcraft.com XML related technologies have really taken off on the Apache platform; there are many large co's using this software to build enterprise solutions. How to fund it - some of these large co's pay their own staff to contribute to important Open Source projects. I do not believe that Open Source will replace the SAP's, PeopleSofts etc of the world any time soon; but for infrastructure bets, it would be foolish to discount Open Souce as a serious contender. I run a small business almost entirely off of Open Source software; from database to networking to web platform to email and spam control to firewall ... there are terrific solutions out there - some quite capable of being deployed at the enterprise level. IBM and some others appear to have a real strategy to co-exist and complement this approach. Microsoft is probably the biggest loser in any large, long term, open souce infrastructure success. And consulting firms of course.