IDC report on open source [LWN.net]

IDC has announced the availability of a new study on open source and the software industry. "Although open source will significantly reduce the industry opportunity over the next ten years, the real impact of open source is to sustain innovations in mature software markets, thus extending the useful life of software assets and saving customers money."

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IDC report on open source

Posted Aug 18, 2006 3:38 UTC (Fri) by jsarets (guest, #39560) [Link]

The point being made here is that software vendors will increasingly turn to open source models to sustain the life of mature and legacy products. However, I don't think this will work that well in most cases. The public availability of the source code is only one part of what makes open source development models so successful.

The other ingredient is clean implementations and modular design, which are essential properties of most open source projects. We've seen what happens when proprietary software is released as open source. OpenOffice and Mozilla (for example) are fine products, but they make suboptimal open source projects.

Software vendors that open source previously proprietary software products will find that open source won't let them realize the cost efficiencies they were expecting. At best, it will trigger a new spike in bug reports as the open source community audits the new code, and the last thing these vendors want is bug reports against legacy software.