Open source philosophy under threat

Sam Higgins, Forrester senior analyst ANZ, says there is ample evidence that giant software vendors are revising their product and marketing strategies around open source.

As Higgins points out, the last year has seen IBM acquire Gluecode Software, CA spin out the Ingres database into a separate open source company and even Microsoft create

several open source licences for its software.

“The thing that gets me is where do I go to find an ISV now that the industry is becoming so commoditised? Where did all the independent companies go?”

Higgins says Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss makes perfect sense but says that if Oracle buys Novell it places CA as the only ISV left in the field.

“Given all the criticism that’s been thrown at Microsoft and even IBM over the years it’s a complete turnaround because that’s exactly where the rest of the market is going,” he says.

Higgins says the trigger for Forrester’s latest open source report was Oracle acquiring Sleepycat Software, developer of the open source BerkeleyDB database.

“We started doing some digging around and found there was a lot more activity going on. This is just the start of it — I think the next couple of years will be extremely interesting in the open source market.”

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