Gartner Says Commercial Projects Will Drive 50% of Open Source Revenue
Recently I’ve seen a lot of references to Gartner’s report “Predicts 2009: The Evolving Open-Source Software Model” which includes this key finding:
“By 2012, at least 50% of direct commercial revenue attributed to open-source products or services will come from projects under a single vendor's patronage.”
I’m not buying it.
As of right now, the vast majority of open source revenue comes from Linux, which is not under a single vendor’s patronage. Even with the growth of commercial open source projects that are under a single vendor’s patronage, much of the most used open source (think: most Apache projects) is not. Many companies, from systems integrators to support providers like OpenLogic, will derive open source revenue from support and services around those “community projects".
I agree with Gartner that the number of new open source projects that are backed by a single vendor is growing, but I think we are a lot more than 3 years away from the point where those projects will represent 50% of all open source revenue.
