There are enormous discussions and posts in the past whether to adapt the Open source or not. It was a matter of choice in the past. Today the whole world has changed. The clouds are looking dark. Every one is witnessing a sense of insecurity about the future due to what is happening around us. In early 2000, the slowdown was caused primarily due to tech industry but we did not witness this bad. Today it’s different and the financial meltdown caused millions of layoffs and an insecure mind in so called white scholar tech savvy developers. Though, tech is not necessarily heart of this, but feeling its share of pain.
The corporate budgets are shrinking and the CEO and CIOs are bound to think innovative ways to cut costs. I think all these paying in positive direction towards open source community and open source business model. The open source companies are making money due to they can be more innovative and at the same time can sell products and services in a much cheaper price of what the proprietary software can offer.
The open source business model is gaining a rapid momentum. Companies like Redhat, IBM, Sun are the testimony for the fact that open source is not just a myth but is a viable and sustainable business model. At the core of this, what we are witnessing is the collaboration and hence it fosters innovation. One of the testimony for this is foundation like GNU, Eclipse, Apache, Open office, KDE to name a few. I can say today most of the proprietary companies either one way or other use open source. Almost all the big tech companies like IBM, SUN , ORACLE, GOOGLE more and more either adapting or changing to open source business model. It is so much so that the VCs are not willing to invest proprietary if the business model does not allow to outsource the IP engineering. This momentum and growth is fundamentally restructuring the social freedom and sustainable one.
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