Did they get it right? A look back at our September Open Source Market Update

Last September we ran our bianual roundtable on the Open Source Market and where it's going. As the calendar turns to 2010, it's nice to take a look back at our predictions and see whether they've come to fruition, or whether we've still got a long row to hoe in 2010.

Participating in this panel were:

Anthony Gold, Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) President, Open Solutions Alliance

Joe McKendrick, Contributing Editor and Analyst, ebizQ
Pierre Fricke, Director of Product Management for the SOA & Business Rules Management System products, Red Hat
Debbie Moynihan, Director, FUSE Community & Marketing, Progress Software

Here were some of their observations and predictions from September 2009:

Debbie saw a lot of concern in the marketplace about a wave of acquisitions, but assured us all that acquisitions can be a good thing if managed properly. The key from Debbie's experience is to bring the open source developers on board and continue to allow the community to thrive. Her prediction was that seeing success with this sort of strategy would help companies in the overall market to more rapidly adopt open source.

Pierre saw the frenzy in September as part of a normal cycle in this business: innovation, followed by a competitive food fight, followed by mergers and acquisitions. His prediction was that as the open source community would continue to create new types of software, and however disruptive they may be these innovations would feed into the normal market machine to point to new sources of revenue and keep the industry vibrant.

Anthony looked into the future and proclaimed that with changes in the economy IT managers would look to open source to execute projects that get quick ROI within a matter of weeks. This includes switching out older systems to open source ones, for a quick fix cost savings.

To sum up the discussion Joe pointed to a "cross-pollination" effect between open source communities and the large companies which adopt them, (regardless of the degree of force in the relationship.)

So what do you think? From our vantage point in 2010, are these predictions coming true? Or too soon to tell? Let us know in the comments.