Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
That's interesting because those of us who've been around in the community for a while have seen more total cost of ownership surveys than we'd care to bat an eyelid at; those from Microsoft say Windows and its brethren are cheaper to run while those from people in the FOSS sphere claim the opposite.
It now looks like the cat is out of the bag and perceptions are changing - FOSS is indeed cheaper to use both at a personal and business level but then a lot of FUD has obscured this for a long time.
There are other statistics (if only the late Benjamin Disraeli had not made that famous statement!) to back up this - 108 of the participants said that lower acquisition and maintenance costs were among the top three factors that made open source attractive. Once again this is a no-brainer to those of us who have been running FOSS for years and keeping the budget in the black - but to hear it from the "enterprise" is indeed encouraging.
Ninety-two participants said freedom from vendor lock-in (ah, we know what that means!) was a significant factor while 97 cited the flexibility of FOSS and the acccessibility to libraries of common code.
The percentages that emerged when the participants were asked what companies would command a majority of commercial open source software revenue give no clear indication of what kind of business model will bring in the biggest yields. A little over a third said platform vendors - read Oracle, Sun, IBM - would be the biggest gainers Less than half that percentage opted for companies like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!.
Half the survey participants opined that software as a service would have the greatest impact on software delivery and business models for open source applications and middleware vendors. Virtualisation, which was on the lips of world + dog a year ago, was just about half as hot.
Can a start-up vendor hope to enter the business software market with a product that is not open source? Nearly 80 percent said this was not possible now.
And when it came to areas which could be most vulnerable to disruption by FOSS in the next five years, web publishing and content management ranked highest followed by social software (ugh!) and business intelligence. But business intelligence (an oxymoron?) also figured in the top answers when participants were asked which sectors of the open source industry would never be disrupted.
For the statistically inclined, the complete survey is here . And for the people at North Bridge, a thought to ponder - open source is not just a business model. Red Hat has got so far because it has kept to the straight and narrow and been open about other things as well. I don't think I need to elaborate.
David Bass
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