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The Economy is Hardly Done Driving Enterprise Open Source Adoption

Ross Turk, directory of community at SourceForge, has a notable column up today at InfoWorld, where he considers whether the economic downturn really is good for open source. We've reported on the topic a number of times, and concluded that for the most part, the gloomy times are boosting open source adoption. Survey respondents recently overwhelmingly agreed with that, as seen here. Turk points out that in the difficult economic period seen in 2000 to 2002, open source adoption in enterprises took off, but he points out that this time things may be different. Is he right?

Turk notes that SourceForge.net served an all-time high of more than a petabyte of downloads last September, and that between September 2008 and February 2009, downloads increased by at least 30 percent from the year before. He also reports that SourceForge is witnessing a large increase in the number of new open source projects being created.

However, he adds this:

"While history may repeat itself, I think it's probably going to be a harder fight this time. The magnitude of this recession is far greater than the one in 2000-2002, and it may not be enough for open source to offer the most cost-effective solutions at a time when companies face massive budget cuts and are hesitant to adopt new software. After all, what good is a cost advantage if nobody's buying anything at all?"

Turk also points out that the areas where open source is competitive are different these days. In the 2000-to-2002 period, open source competed in the operating system, middleware, and database arenas primarily. I agree with him that "open source has now spread up the software stack into business applications and into mobile and desktop applications that businesses and professionals use every day."

Still, I would argue that open source solutions are hardly done fighting it out in the operating system, middleware and database arenas. Just consider the success that Red Hat is having on the Linux front, and take a look at how hundreds of respondents to the recent Future of Open Source Survey felt about categories where open source can still be dispruptive:

 

Also, while an environment where companies don't do any technology buying at all would no doubt be bad news for commercial open source players, lots of key open source platforms and applications are completely free at this point. Also, most of the enterprise adoption of open source solutions seen in 2000 to 2002 resulted from decision making from IT departments. Now, as Sun Microsystems has confirmed with MySQL adoption, and as seen in many other similar examples, departments in enterprises are making their own use of open source tools, based on their own decisions. Awareness of open source has spread to departmental-level workers.

I agree with Turk that things are different this time, but we're in the middle of a second economically-driven boost for open source. As budgets at enterprises remain tight, open source solutions will undoubtedly remain attractive.

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by Ross Turk on Mar. 30, 2009

I think your conclusion is right - ultimately, I think open source has a large advantage in this economy. There is a lot of reason for optimism.

I think it's important to keep a healthy level of skepticism, though. The audience has become larger and more fragmented, and the movement will therefore require a different level of sophistication. I want us all to keep our eye on the ball, not get cocky, and keep innovating!

Thanks for your thoughts.

Ross

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by Sam Dean on Mar. 30, 2009

Good points Ross. Some level of skepticism is probably healthy, and things are getting more fragmented. It was a thought -provoking column. Thanks.

Sam

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by Randy Clark on Mar. 30, 2009

Let us not forget that license fees make up only a small portion of the overall project spend for any enterprise project. While the 'Free' in FOSS helps reduce that, it is still, at the end of the day, a really small portion of the overall project spend. I fail to see how a downturn will not affect ALL providers, including FOSS projects. Sure, people will tinker more with Open Source, but until FOSS can really begin to reduce the deployment costs via innovative features, the 'threat' to FOSS remains. I agree with Ross and Sam that it is extremely premature to declare victory and continue to crank out great products!

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