If you’re a commercial vendor you better learn to play nice with open source. Open source has developed a tremendous following and it’s here to stay. There is no question that open source has its drawbacks and it’s not as good as some of its advocates would have you believe, but it’s certainly not the buckets of problems that commercial vendors claim. As with most things in life, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
According to a recent study by Gartner, by 2011 at least 80% of commercial software will contain at least some open source components. Some commercial vendors have already started building either application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow developers of open source software to connect to their commercial code or opening components of their proprietary code to the open source community.
Within IT, whether a company has implemented Nagios, OpenNMS or another open source solution, its important for commercial vendors to understand that users are not going to throw away their time and resource investment in an open implementation. Commercial vendors should look to activate the open source investment that an end user has already made. Makes sense to me at least.
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