ZDNet: Gartner’s Predictions for Linux and Open Source

“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…”

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