Making Money With Open Source Software

Hugh MacLeod posted a question on his site: If open source is such a phenomenon, where are all the open source billionaires? That is the premise of a recent Wired IT article.

Some would say that not all rewards are financial ones. Open source is motivated by community, social interactions, and peer recognition.

But for some that is not enough and recently we've started to see some decent financial rewards for open source project that has started to turn some heads.

The graph here shows that January of 2008 may be a landmark month in terms of financial success associated with the open source movement. More acquisitions (in terms of dollar amounts) were done in January of 2008 than all of 2007.

This may be a sign of things to come. The reasons for the surge of activity could be many. RedHat claims the surge in open source activity, according to their CEO, has to do with the unpopularity of the US. Others point to the turbulent economic environment and the fact that open source software is recession proof.

Open source is now found in areas that once were thought improbable. It's being used at large hedge funds, which have been notoriously insistent on proprietary systems, places like Wal-Mart for tracking their health care records, and even large banks, who have an even stronger reputation of focusing on proprietary system, have decided to at least evaluate and in some cases take on large open source projects.

Whatever the reason for the recent surge open source may be reaching the critical mass it needs to become a mainstay in corporate IT environments. You'll start to see more and more companies make open source their default choice unless there is a strong business case to use proprietary software. I think most IT environments think of the large open source projects as enterprise worthy. In addition almost every large hardware and software vendor (e.g. HP, IBM, Sun, Oracle, Microsoft) have some sort of open source strategy already. This should help further fuel the acquisition market for open source projects.

Edsor3
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http://www.outervillage.com
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