Bill Snyder has written a great series of stories over at Infoworld, covering the 10 most underreported information technology news stories of 2007. Hopefully it is not news to ebizQ readers but Bill, a very savvy experienced journalist, feels one of the ten is the fact that the mainstream media has missed the extent to which open source software (OSS) pureplays "have been steadily integrating parts of the hated commercial software subscription model into their business."
"Say it ain't so, Linus," he comments.
As our research published over in the Open Source Features section shows in detail, we have a hard time even finding any pure plays outside of the Free Software Foundation (FSF)--which believes software programs are trees or fish or whatever. Red Hat's on the cusp and it remains to be seen which way it breaks in 2008. My bet is that under new day-to-day leadership, Red Hat breaks more commerical than free.
That is the debate of course: free vs. commercial, not OSS vs. commercial. As our ebizQ research also shows, OSS is not a business model but a set of terms and conditions and a development culture. Playing Bill's "underreported" game but just concentrating on OSS, here's my list for 2007:
-- IBM probably surpassed Red Hat as the largest provider of software under OSS terms and conditions as measured by revenue
-- Red Hat's intention to gain 50% worldwide server market share by 2015
-- The lack of acceptance of version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL) by the Red Hats and MySQLs of the world (this is the key to Bill Snyder's story of course)
-- Red Hat taking on TIBCO and IBM in middleware with its MRG technology
-- Microsoft will probably have as many Linux boxes in its big "online" server farms as Longhorn systems; the new Microsoft question (also under new management) will be "what will it take to beat Google and IBM, not Linux"
As for Linus, Bill, of course he works for IBM, HP and Intel.
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