Mark Driver, one of the organizers of Gartner's Open Source Summit capped his introductory presentation by telling IT managers that ignoring open source is no longer an option. He called open source "the biggest change in corporate IT since distributed computing." As Driver said, "Open source is not a niche, not a fad." And on the competitive front "competing against open source is tilting at windmills." These w Mark Driver, one of the organizers of Gartner’s Open Source Summit capped his introductory presentation by telling IT managers that ignoring open source is no longer an option. He called open source “the biggest change in corporate IT since distributed computing.” As Driver said, “Open source is not a niche, not a fad.” And on the competitive front “competing against open source is tilting at windmills.”These were strong words, but backed up by good research and observations: – By 2011, Gartner predicts that at least 80% of all commercial software solutions will include substantive open source. – Open source is being used equally for mission critical and non-mission critical applications. Gartner’s survey shows 49.7% of open source usage is being done for “mission critical” applications, as compared to 59% for proprietary software and 58.5% for internal development. The overall theme of the conference has evolved this year from explaining what open source is, to how and where companies should adopt open source without getting burned. We’re now in the “third wave” of adoption, which has moved from the emotional stage, to a second stage of realism and now a third stage about leverage. Driver suggested four elements in assessing open source and its notable that these are not radically different from assessing closed source software: -Fitness of purpose – Does the software do what it needs to do? -Maturity – Is the software mature enough to provide an acceptable risk/reward ratio for your organization -Your technology adoption profile – Are you an early adopter, mainstream or late adopter? -Deployment scenario – How will it be deployed? Is it a mission critical application? He also noted that while the early adoption has been done by “technology aggressive” firms, it is heading for more mainstream adoption by 2012 and that the patterns of adoption will be different as a result. Early adopters typically care most about flexibility and independence, and less about cost and risk. However, in his view, we’re now at the mid-point and for mainstream adopters, the priorities are reversed: cost and risk are typically more important than flexibility and independence. Driver encouraged attendees to develop an open source policy saying that open source adoption “has to be managed” alongside existing software. He also noted that open source has achieved dramatic success in the infrastructure layer: operating systems (Linux), application servers (JBoss, Tomcat), DBMS (MySQL), and security (Snort). The next wave of adoption will be at the application level: CRM, content management, supply chain management, elearning, etc. Driver noted that while open source doesn’t guarantee it, in most cases there is better quality and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The Gartner Open Source Summit was held in conjunction with two other Gartner conferences on Portals and Web Innovation in Las Vegas. While there were several hundred people in total, the open source group felt smaller than previous years. The program is excellent, but I’m not sure it makes sense to combine open source in with these other groups. (Also, I had trouble getting connected on their wireless network, but that’s just me.) Open Source