Dave reports that IDC's latest report "Worldwide Standalone Open Source Software 2008–2012 Forecast: A Preliminary View" estimates that the stand-alone OSS market will grow from $1.73B in 2007 to $4.83B in 2012. That's a 23 percent annual growth rate to 2012 vs. 7.7 percent annual growth for the overall software market. Interesting to note that $4.8B represents 1.3 percent of the overall software market. The pre Dave reports that IDC’s latest report “Worldwide Standalone Open Source Software 2008–2012 Forecast: A Preliminary View” estimates that the stand-alone OSS market will grow from $1.73B in 2007 to $4.83B in 2012. That’s a 23 percent annual growth rate to 2012 vs. 7.7 percent annual growth for the overall software market.Interesting to note that $4.8B represents 1.3 percent of the overall software market. The previous version of the IDC data suggested that stand-alone OSS spending would come in at 1.8 percent of the total 2011 market spending. (Don’t try to reconcile the two figures, as forecasting is difficult and usually +/- a wide margin). But as the report’s author, IDC’s Matt Lawton, highlights: “However, we need to also provide some context. Standalone open source software is an important but small segment of open source software. Large vendors are realizing significant revenues indirectly from their activities with and support of embedded and complementary open source software. In addition, unpaid open source software adoption is significant but not included in our revenue estimates.”Matt Lawton is a very bright guy and “gets it” when open source is the topic of discussion.Good to see that the data continues to support the idea of OSS becoming an aspect of the software market, rather than “the beginning of the end” as some had predicted.PS: I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.” Open Source