Open Source in the Enterprise: Here to Stay?

Kendall Square is an online media outlet focused on information technology in the enterprise. I can’t think of a better way to start off our blog than by taking on the subject of open source. Perhaps what’s most interesting about open source and its impact on the enterprise is the extent to which open source projects have already penetrated the walls of IT with the private and public sectors.

In fact, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, shows proof of this after a recent meeting he had with the head of IT for a major corporation. He talks about it in a recent blog titled MySQL Wins at LinkedIn!. The executive had just completed an audit of their current projects and found “hundreds” of open source projects that were either completed or underway. Hundreds. That’s in one company alone.

Or check out the stats on SourceForge – dubbed the world’s largest development and download repository of open source code and applications – which hosts more than 180,000 projects, more than 1.9 million registered users, and has seen over 250,000 downloads per month. That is a lot of activity. Surely, a fair number of these projects have a direct or indirect enterprise component.

One other simple test might be to look at the response established vendors are taking as they position themselves with the open source movement. Notice I said “with” rather than “against”. We already know Sun’s position, especially with their acquisition of MySQL. Every major technology player – whether IBM, HP, Oracle, Microsoft, or any number of others – has a strategy and set of offerings related to their open source initiative.

Depending on how you want to view these data points will probably effect whether or not you think open source in the enterprise is here to stay. I think it’s not only here to stay but that it will further propel the IT industry further because, after all, open source represents competition for proprietary solutions. In the end, the customers come out the winner. And there’s no turning back the tide when economic, social, and competitive forces are at work.

In the coming weeks and months we’ll continue to explore the impact of open source on the enterprise while keeping up with the latest products, solutions, and initiatives from the technology vendors that you use and rely on to keep your business or organization running a step ahead of the competition.

Stay tuned and thank you for reading.