OStatic

There's a good recap on CNet today of findings from IDC's latest report on open source. Among other things IDC is reportedly forecasting that open source software revenues will reach $4.83 billion by 2012, growing at a 23 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Among several interesting aspects about the report, revenue from new OSS projects is expected to grow at 32 percent CAGR over the same time period. According to CNET's report, IDC director Matt Lawton also cautioned that standalone open source deployments are only one component of accurate forecasts. I very much agree with that last note of caution.

In a recent post we did here at OStatic on Forrester Research's findings on open source use in enterprises, the Forrester researchers who provided me with material pointed out that there is a disconnect between some of the data Forrester got and what the firm is actually hearing about adoption. One of the reasons they pointed to for this is that decision makers at enterprises often aren't aware of their use of open source wrapped in commercial products from IBM, Novell, and Sun.

Open source software use, much more so than proprietary software use, often includes layers of difficult-to-measure usage patterns. There are open source components wrapped into commercial products, and, increasingly, it is common for employees at the departmental level to be using open source when higher-ups don't even know that they are.

This last point was made at Sun's recent OpenSolaris unveiling Sun officials reported that it was tough to get a bead on exact deployment numbers for Sun's open source offerings because many departmental-level managers were using OSS without IT departments knowing about it.

It's important to note that this phenomenon closely mirrors what happened in the early days of the personal computer software industry. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was very common, for example, for departmental managers to be setting up LANs so that their workgroups could share network resources, and more. You would even find departments using their own cloistered e-mail systems, separate from how the rest of the enterprise communicated.

That's how it worked with new software tools then, and I think open source deployments in enterprises will continue to work that way. Never underestimate the power of guerrilla, grassroots deployment of new technologies, especially when the tools are free.

• Sun Microsystems
• IDC