The Packet Scoop

As mentioned in this blog on more than one occasion it’s the clear opinion of PacketTrap that commercial open source is a dying business model. You’ve read our rather opinionated posts that commercial open source exploits the free and good faith efforts of great software developers to make a profit.  And of course our friend David Rosenberg shot back, albeit a little personal for him. 

PacketTrap, on the other hand, is a pure commercial company. We integrate with already installed open source, but we are a proprietary network management software company. We are huge supporters of open source projects of course, but believe the business model of commercial open source is inherently flawed.

It seems that others are starting to spend more time thinking through these issues. Specially, in this blog, it was posted:

“When a Forrester Research representative emailed with the following survey highlights, I was more than a little surprised:

Forrester released data today analyzing trend lines in enterprise open source usage in 2007. Among the key findings:

Seventy percent of decision-makers responded that they don’t have interest or have no plans to adopt open source software; Only 23 percent of respondents said expanding their use of open source software was a priority; Security is the main concern around adopting open source software. Eighty-eight percent of respondents said it was an important or very important concern.”

The data is from 1,017 decision makers in North America & Europe. The survey was conducted in Q3 2007.”

And the conversation goes further in this blog by Roberto Galoppini.

Most importantly, what does it mean if you’re an end user in a IT department? If you work with commercial open source companies either these companies will start to look like regular commercial companies or they will go away (which could be a challenge for you, the consumer).