This year, for the first time, respondents to the annual Future of Open Source Survey chose “better software quality” as the No. 1 reason for adopting open source. Is innovation in enterprise software happening anywhere else other than in open source land?
Hadoop is at the center of the big data trend. OpenStack has the momentum in private cloud. Open source frameworks and IDEs absolutely dominate app dev, while all the leading NoSQL databases are open source. Android now powers more smartphones than any other mobile OS. Plus, Microsoft and Salesforce excepted, you’d be hard-pressed to find a cloud provider that uses anything but open source software to deliver its service.
IBM’s public embrace of Cloud Foundry at OSCON provides a telling example of open source’s pole position. As with OpenStack, IBM is providing code contributions, but the Cloud Foundry community will steer development.
Consider the Source