Commercial software vendors challenged to address shift Enterprises are opening up to open source alternatives to commercial software, panelists said at the SDForum conference “Open Source Entering the Mainstream,” held in Santa Clara, Calif., last week.Attitudes have changed, said Eric Friedman, infrastructure architecture team lead at Wells Fargo. “In the last two years, I’ve seen a tectonic shift in this area” of corporate attitudes toward open source, Friedman said. Instead of needing explanations of open source, companies now are asking, “Why are we buying a vendor product when we could use this open source thing?”Commercial software companies are now forced to address the issue of open source, said Bruce Momjian, who has participated with the PostgreSQL Global Development Group and is a principal consultant at SRA International. “There really are no companies that aren’t being challenged now by open source,” he said. Open source is creating a new age, said Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource.“Increasingly, open source software is [of] higher quality and increasingly is starting to meet the capabilities of commercial software — and in some cases is overtaking [it],” Polese said. Software Development