:ZDNet: Gartner's Predictions for Linux and Open Source
ZDNet: Gartner's Predictions for Linux and Open Source Jul 25, 2002, 01 :00 UTC (24 Talkback[s]) (11310 reads) (Other stories by George Weiss)
"SPA 1. Massive software development communities linked together by the World Wide Web as a public-domain resource and collection pool will speed the commoditization of operating-system functionality and reductions in pricing, especially when required in standards-based interoperability and administration in the next 24 months (0.9 probability).
"Although this may appear obvious now, three years ago many experts were still questioning this approach as fraught with frivolous hackers and dealing with far-more-complex issues that a large, nonvendor community was ill-equipped to address. Today, the Open Source Software (OSS) community has demonstrated that it can organize itself into selective peer groups with responsibility as the "maintainer" for the ongoing development and leadership of kernel and applications. How far up the "food chain" this process applies has still not been proven. We know it works well at the infrastructure (such as load balancing, caching, Domain Naming System, Secure Sockets Layer acceleration), with Web services (such as Apache) and at the plumbing level. We have seen some progress in databases (such as MySQL), but the process is still inconclusive with regard to high-availability clustering, system management and transaction middleware..."
