Open Source Viability
Forrester has a new research report on Open Source Strategy that has some interesting data. Of the firms they interviewed, 72% plan to use more open source. The biggest reason for using open source? — 68% responded with cost as the primary factor. And 80% say that the SCO lawsuit has no effect on their plans. (Thank you, I’m glad that people get that SCO is “smoking crack,” as Linus said.) Their analysis concludes with “open source will move relentless up the software stack.”
They evaluate the major open source players, including Linux, MySQL, Tomcat, and JBoss. They deem Linux is ready for the enterprise, but JBoss is not. Check out the “Forrester Wave” graph on the right to see what other open source software they say has enterprise visibility.
October 7th, 2003 at 1:16 pm
Around here where I work, we use a lot of Open Source. Not because the higher-ups dictate that we do, but because the grunts in the cubicles just go out to SourceForge and grab it.
Unfortunately, the place where I work has this defiling notion that they shouldn’t have to spend a dime on developer tools. The last license that was purchased for the whole IT department for a development tool was version 9 of UltraEdit. And only 25 licenses at that (More than 50 people probably use it on a daily basis). Of course, UltraEdit is now upto version 10 or higher. Most of use now use Eclipse for the majority of our daily coding tasks and UltraEdit for those times when you want to just fire up a quick text editor.
I’ve dabbled with jEdit some, but having Eclipse, WebLogic and jEdit all running at the same time can cause one to rip our their eyes because of the resource hogs that are the 3 JVMs that are all competing for the same resources.
Will the Apache/Jakarta’s J2EE App Server overtake JBoss? JBoss has been around and under development for quite some time. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with that.