Open Source projects dominated by IT vendors

More vendors are getting involved in open source project despite the economic slowdown. Gartner has reported many key findings related to open source in Predicts 2009: The Evolving Open-Source Software Model report. Gartner reports that 50 percent of direct commercial revenue attributed to open-source products or services will come from projects under a single vendor's patronage. Many new projects are being commercialized early in their maturity phases - often by a dot-com startup and before a broad community "network effect" is firmly established. These projects are often under the patronage of a single vendor that employs nearly all key code contributors.

According to Gartner's key findings, driven by expanding mainstream IT adoption, open-source usage profiles are shifting to more-conservative, risk-versus-reward dynamics. As a result, new adopters now place an increasing premium on commercial support channels to establish service-level agreements on par with closed-source alternatives. Gartner recommends that companies should understand the role that a broad and vendor-independent community plays in mature open-source projects. More specifically, keep in mind that intellectual-property warrants and indemnities are strongest when vendors maintain more control over the source code pedigree.

The report also says that through 2011, less than 50 percent of Global 2000 IT organizations would have implemented a formal open-source adoption and management policy as part of an enterprise software asset management strategy. Open Source Software (OSS) has become unavoidable for most IT organizations. Open source is leveraged in virtually all mainstream enterprises. A comprehensive enterprise open-source adoption policy is the most important critical path towards establishing an optimal balance between risk and reward; however, less than 30 percent of IT organizations have such a policy in place.

Agencies