Open Source Blog

According to IDC, open source will become "business as usual" in two-to-three years and is "moving up the investment agenda of companies worldwide" prompting the research firm to encourage its services clients to get on the bus by developing new business models and services offerings around open source to attract new customers.

What is particularly interesting about IDC's recommendations is that the company suggests services firms need to not only adjust their business models for open source but also be able to demonstrate their commitment top open source and open standards.

In 2004 IDC predicted that the market for IT services around Linux and other open source software projects would more than double from $98m to $228m in 2008, but would still be less than 1% of the total Western European IT services market.

Meanwhile, one of the more open source friendly service firms, Atos Origin, predicted a seismic shift in the software landscape to open source last year.

While a seismic shift often has sudden and dramatic results, the movement of the tectonic plates that causes those results is itself a slow and, until relatively recently, difficult to measure.

The same is true of the move to open source - and while there were no volcanic events while I was away, there were some minor indications of plate movement. Red Hat announced that the Federal Aviation Administration has saved $15m by moving to Enterprise Linux, for example.

The UK's Cabinet Office also gave Linux its endorsement, thanks to a proof of concept project with IBM and partners on its Security Enhanced Linux for Mandatory Access Control environments.

Meanwhile open source continued to expand into new areas, with Zmanda launching what it says is the first commercialised version of the Amanda open source backup tool. The network-based file-level backup tool can copy data to disk or tape, or both targets simultaneously, and includes tools such as an automated scheduler that will check and backup changed data.

And it might not have anything to do with enterprise open source, but in the unlikely event that you ever wanted to boot your Mac to run Linux using your iPod, you can also now do that too.