75% of UK business will use open source within 5 years

[Steve]

A National Computing Centre survey has concluded that some three quarters of UK businesses will have some form of open source system in place within the next five years.

Companies are aiming to keep costs down and they see open source as a way to do that, but many are worried about support.

Open source offerings have already proved their viability in a climate where business value from IT investment is the driver, said Michael Dean, membership director at The National Computing Centre.

"Further competition in the marketplace will benefit everybody and continued encouraging actions from the government will accelerate its adoption," he said in a statement.

[ZDNet]

[ikonia]

not sure I can agree on that %100

Yes companies will start using opensource based projects, such as Linux (an easy example) but where revenue generation is demanded companies will still use paid for solutions, such as Redhat Enterprise eddition, which if you look at the cost of compared to say a Windows 2003 server (just an easy example) there is not much difference.

Companies that want to generate money will either have to hire an expensive hardcore crew of geeks to support open platforms without vendor support, or pay for vendor support which normally comes in at around a similar price to MS.

the only ones that wil really benifit from this are much larger companies where the smaller savings from say a linux support agreement will multiple over a bigger machine volume.

[5lab]

i cirtainly cant see that being the case. i doubt 75% of companies will update their computers in any way over 5 years, let alone adding a new os etc

[dangel]

Rubbish - pointy headed managers like windows and they control the purse strings.. The though of all that retraining too..

[directhex]

SOME use of open source? sure. probably spamassassin for the most part.

but 75% doing actual desktop migration? no chance

[Dougal]

A lot of indian companies have gone OSS.

Lots of 3rd world are going soley open source, look at what AMD did with their all in one base unit.

[TheAnimus]

yeh but this is ment for UK business.

I don't think this has any chance of happening. Amount of people who still use green terminals running DOS like OS's.

Most people will still use Office, for the simple reason the colleges and schools use office. No re-training cost, all the staff can use it.

The thing is when you compare the cost of the support options, MS really isn't much more expensive (they claim oodles of reports showing how much cheaper they are). Not to mention the cost benefit of say IIS with .net over PHP runing under apache (you can easily get twice the traffic on the same hardware, 3 times without zend).

Not to mention most people have a lack of faith with the "risk" peroid of most open source apps. They like to have everything one company + in house things, When you have patches for SSHd (a remote shell) been released on different days to the kernel patch which fixes a inter-process security issue. All needing urgent attention, many veterains will not use it on principle.

[TiG]

I'd say most of the corporates may all be using one piece of open source in 5 years (if they aren't already), but they will still be using millions upon millions of pounds worth of purchased black box software too.

A very wild "statistics can say anything" claim. Doesn't have much value behind it imo.
TiG