spending

There's a lot of money in free software.

That's good news, because as the recession takes its toll on IT budgets, a new study suggests that companies can save $387 billion in development costs by using open-source software.

Talk about a stimulus.

Black Duck Software arrives at the $387 billion number by applying industry cost estimation standards to the available 4.9 billion lines of open-source code. Additionally, the company:

Estimates that 10 percent of IT application development spending is redundant with existing open-source projects, (which means that) U.S. companies could realize savings of more than $22 … Read more

Most vendors are already preparing for a tough Christmas.

Those selling Linux-based solutions, however, can expect to spread plenty of holiday cheer, according to a new report from IDC, "The Opportunity for Linux in a New Economy." (PDF)

Even as Red Hat recently talked up its impressive quarterly results, it's important to recognize that not all of Linux's success can be seen in corporate financial results. Much of the benefits of Linux comes from unpaid deployments, which continue to account for a healthy margin of total deployments:

Of course, as noted, there remains plenty of revenue … Read more

Like begets like, and in the software world, open-source purchasing begets even more open-source purchases.

At least, that's the lesson I take from a recent Piper Jaffray report that suggests JBoss customers plan to invest heavily in Red Hat technology.

Not only are JBoss customers more likely to buy deeply into Red Hat, which is not surprising (though for Red Hat, it must be gratifying), but they're also more likely to buy MySQL and less likely to buy from Microsoft.

This can't be good news for Microsoft, and it probably is one reason the company has become so aggressive with its intellectual-property portfolio. … Read more

Gartner is predicting a deep decline of 3.8 percent in IT spending in 2009, as ZDNet's Larry Dignan reports, which could be a blessing in disguise for enterprises, IT employees, and software vendors.

CIO.com points to a few ways in which budget freezes can help information technology, one being that it encourages IT to "(take advantage of) systems you've already sunk potentially millions (of dollars) into."

Rather than relentlessly seeking out the next big IT project, a better strategy may be to invest more deeply in existing projects that have yet to pay for … Read more

It's perhaps no secret that the enterprise sales model is broken. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and open source have picked the lock on the enterprise, enabling CIOs to try before they buy, disrupting the old model of paying far too much for demoware and roadmap dreams.

It's a welcome shift of risk from the buyer to the vendor, as Geva Perry highlights:

We're now witnessing an increasing trend of bottom-up sales. A casual decision made by developers on a day-to-day basis, not a grand strategy laid out by the CIO. Try-and-buy is the norm, and so are subscription payments … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--A bad economy is good for open source, declared Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst in his keynote at Open Source Business Conference 2009, but open source's value proposition should play well in any economy.

At OSBC 2008, Whitehurst suggested that enterprise IT needs to join the open-source conversation, contributing code back to derive greater benefit than mere consumption of open source can offer.

This year, Whitehurst moved beyond this meme to focus on why enterprises should buy open source in the first place, never mind contribute open-source code.

Whitehurst pilloried the traditional proprietary sales model, a theme the Red Hat team has raised before, … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--In case you weren't able to attend the Open Source Business Conference today, or simply arrived too late to hear my opening remarks, I shared this video to illustrate how open source is rising...even as the economy falls.

Enjoy.

Linux long ago became the "furniture" of open source: essential infrastructure to most of the Fortune 500 and somewhat mundane in its predictable, ever-increasing adoption.

Despite its impressive rise, however, Linux still has a long, long way to go. While results of an IDC survey published this week found that 55 percent of the 300 IT executives surveyed already had Linux systems in use, a full 97 percent were running Windows.

Linux, in other words, still has a long way to go to reach full adoption and, importantly, the vendors that sell it have even further to go … Read more

Back in the good old days, enterprises paid through the nose for software and didn't ask too many questions. Those days are gone.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Oracle customers are asking serious questions about its bloated maintenance pricing, which no doubt translates into hefty discounts. Meanwhile, Microsoft is shaving its leasing pricing by as much as 25 percent, CNET notes.

What gives? Not customers, at least--not to the same level they used to, which is forcing software vendors to drop their pricing to keep up. According to a recent Goldman Sachs CIO survey, cost reduction is the … Read more