Concept of open source is not new to us. IT industry has witnessed most aggressive open source movement by various open communities in the past. I remember a time when the entire IT fraternity including traders, customers and professionals across industry verticals were part of the anti-proprietary software campaign, with government sector being the prime navigator.

Industry witnessed most state government organisations issuing a mandate to their IT departments to go the open way across functionalities.

Every desktop or server that was supplied had open software platforms or applications embedded in it.
The trend continued for some time and a huge openware wave invaded the industry till the proprietary software vendors woke up to the alarming drive towards open source. As a natural progression, the proprietary software players reacted vehemently and invaded the customer place with new versions, packaged deals and discounted service delivery models.

With technology evolution on the go and cloud computing becoming all pervasive, proprietary vendors caught the wave to influence the customers in leveraging proprietary software that would enable them to see the desired effect.

As a result, open source market went into a silent mode for a while.

However, the innovation didn’t stop. It looked like the open source developers were busy developing newer applications to navigate the cloud wave, coming up with newer solutions in the process.
As a result, the industry is noticing a renewed interest in open source among customers.

IT Next’s cover feature on open source displays certain stunning revelations (click here to read). It is rather heartening to find that most IT heads consciously list open source as part of their IT strategy, as it helps in driving down the IT spend and meet all their business needs.