Is Open Source adoption set to mushroom in Australia?

Optimism and take-up is growing around the platform-independent code with the industry taking more notice of this fast growing area

Open source technology is far from a new concept, but the market has been making increased noise about its future success.

According to IDC, the market for standalone Open Source software (OSS) is in a significant growth stage and adoption will accelerate through to 2011 as barriers to adoption get knocked down. This mirrors the results of an online poll by CRN that showed the majority of resllers already use OSS.

“We are in the early stages of the development and deployment of OSS”, said Matt Lawton, program director of IDC’s Open Source Software Business Models research program.

“The market is still quite immature, especially now that we see active open source projects in all layers of the software stack. Although we see healthy growth in revenue from standalone open source software, we must keep in mind that revenue will substantially lag behind the distribution of open source software.

Many distributions of standalone open source software are free, while paid distributions typically are based on pay-as-you-go subscriptions rather than pay-up-front license fees”.

IDC’s study shows that the drivers for OSS adoption, and in particular commercial adoption of OSS, include increased customer interest in OSS as customers realise that OSS provides them with more choice and leverage with proprietary software vendors.

In addition, more financial backing from venture capitalists, more comfort with subscription revenue as a business model, and increased interest in OSS within larger enterprise organisations are helping to accelerate the OSS adoption to an even faster rate.

After seeing the OSS sector experience this awakening we have asked our industry experts to answer the question:
Is Open Source technology set to emerge as a dominant force in the Australian market?