I strongly recommend that you read Jeffrey Hammond’s interview published by James Turner on the O’Reilly Radar’s Blog. A Principal Analyst in the Application Development and Program Management Group at Forrester research, Jeffrey is an expert in software development, Web 2.0 and rich internet applications. As such, he is also one of the leading specialists in open source software.

Jeffrey’s insights on how “Open Source is infiltrating the enterprise” are really fascinating. I let you discover them for yourselves, but here are some particularly good extracts.

On the strategic role of OSS: “(…) anyone who tells you that it’s [open source] not being used strategically for mission critical applications isn’t talking to the right people, because I see it used that way as well as on individual projects at the departmental level. I’ll give you one example: I have talked with a large organization that’s using multiple open source products and projects and frameworks as the core of its reservation systems, and they’re pushing 30,000 transactions a second through what’s essentially an open source infrastructure. So I defy anybody to say that that’s not mission critical.”

On security: “I’ve seen open source used as the basis for in-store sales systems that are PCI compliant. So that would counter another fallacy that you often hear; you can’t build secure software with open source. And I defy you to find an example of a system which would need a higher level of governance and qualification than something that’s handling credit card data.”

On costs as a factor of adoption: “So the uses are many and varied, but generally, the goal is to save money. That’s where organizations tend to start. And then what tends to happen is the more that they become comfortable with using open source, and the more that they apply it successfully, the more they start to realize that there are benefits other than cost savings that they can take advantage of. And that’s when you start to see them turn from open source opportunists into open source advocates.”

In this article, Jeffrey refers to the Open Source Developer Report published by the Eclipse Foundation. In May, Ian Skerrett, Director of Marketing for the Eclipse Foundation, published the Top 6 Insights from the Eclipse Community Survey on his blog. The report Is further confirmation that open source software is really taking root in enterprise IT systems, with Linux taking market share, year by year, on the developer side; MySQL competing with Oracle; and, of course, Eclipse which became the de facto IDE.

The show goes on!

Bertrand