Will Open Source Support Providers Ride a Government Gravy Train?
by Sam Dean - Oct. 30, 2009Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
- U.S. Defense Department Cozies Up to Open Source
- Training and Support: Still Key to Enterprise Open Source Adoption
- A New Appeal to Obama to Support FOSS
- Engine Yard, Host for Ruby on Rails Apps, Nabs New Funding
- Is Open Source M&A Set to Go On a Tear?
We've recently written about potentially far-reaching moves by the U.S. government to switch significant parts of its internal software infrastructure to open source. First, the news came out that Whitehouse.gov is now based on the open source Drupal content management system (which OStatic runs on too), then the U.S. Department of Defense announced its plans to move to open source software components and platforms.
When the news broke about Whitehouse.gov and Drupal (and the Obama administration has indicated intent to run other government sites with Drupal), my first thought was that Acquia, which provides commercial support for Drupal, might see some valuable support contracts from the government. InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues takes the idea one step further, though, and I'm inclined to agree with him.
Rodrigues notes that OpenLogic provides commercial support for over 500 open source projects, and that it gets valuable support contracts even for open source projects maintained by companies that provide their own support. Actually, OpenLogic isn't the only player that is pursuing consolidated, third-party support across large numbers of open source projects. Credativ, for example, provides commercial support for a huge number of open source offerings.
In addition to these jacks-of-all-trades in open source support, focused players like Acquia, Cloudera (supporting Hadoop), and Eucalyptus Systems offer support for some of the best, most promising projects. If the U.S. government does indeed make a meaningful switch to open source, any or all of these support providers could be big beneficiaries. Rodrigues writes:
"I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that government becomes OpenLogic's top revenue contributing sector over the next two years."
That wouldn't surprise me either, but it remains to be seen exactly which vendors focused on open source support stand to benefit most from a possible government gravy train.
