Matthew Aslett of The 451 Group recently published an online poll on the CAOS Theory blog about the biggest myths surrounding open source software. The first results are in.

“In no way are the results to be considered scientific (the final two options provide evidence of the informality of the poll), but after 138 votes a picture has emerged that indicates that the biggest myths are:

• It’s free - 17%
• It’s developed by amateurs - 14%
• It’s not for mission critical apps - 11%
• It’s not supported - 10%
• It eradicates vendor lock-in - 8%

The poll is still live and you can still take part.”

No big surprises here — we face this type of argument everyday — but it is interesting to compare these results with an old post written by Tim O’Reilly in 1999: Ten Myths about Open Source Software, which is the transcript of a talk he gave to a group of Fortune 500 executives in October 1998.

Myths are indeed ingrained. As early as 1999, Tim O’Reilly explained that one big myth was that “OSS is not reliable or supported” and another was that “OSS only matters to programmers, since most users never look under the hood anyway,” which match the “It’s not supported” and “It’s ideological” comments from Matthews’ poll.

Other myths, however, have been brought down. The one that amused me, of course, was: “There’s No Money to be Made on Free Software.” Even if making money is not my first ambition, I’m pleased to see that it’s now possible. Sun helped make people aware of that when it took over MySQL for $1 billion.

Another one: “Open Source is all about licenses” has also been debunked, as people realized that the reality was far more extensive and dealt with quality of service, end user satisfaction, and innovation among other things.

Thanks a lot to Matthew for his help looking backwards. But think about it — what will the 10 biggest myths about OSS be ten years from now? Maybe they’ll say: “Leading products from Oracle were created by independent developers.” Nope. Can’t cope with that one. I prefer “ancestor of today’s software 3.0″…

When myths meet reality…

Bertrand