Jim, where are you when we need you?
“Jim,” of course, is Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat. The need? To get more enterprises contributing back to open source. Forrester has found that–Surprise! Surprise!–most enterprises consume open source but don’t contribute back to it.
This isn’t surprising, nor are the reasons and means of adoption:
“…[O]pen source adoption initially focused on the operating system and Web server tiers of the application platform stack, but early success widened the focus to include development tools, infrastructure components such as application servers and databases, and higher-level components such as portal servers and content management systems.”
Lower cost was the main driver for open source deployments with delegates questioned by Forrester highlighting that the cost-based business case was easier to show for lower-level commodity middleware components.
Cost is a primary driver of open-source adoption, and for good reason. For example, Activision recently noted in a Webinar that it had saved “tens of millions of dollars” by going with Alfresco for its Web content management needs, while simultaneously driving innovation and flexibility.
That’s great. But there’s still the ominous note in the article above that support alone doth not a billion-dollar software company make. What happens in subsequent years when the cost savings have been realized but the enterprise is self-sufficient?
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