Linux and TCO in 2012

Gartner has spawned a debate with its latest Open Source Software (OSS) research. Gartner researchers asked more than fifty analysts to comment on the state of OSS in their respective areas of research, and the result was The State of Open Source 2008 report. Among other findings, this report determined that by:

• 2013 a majority of Linux deployments will have no real software TCO advantage over other operating systems;
• 2012 90% of enterprises will use open source either directly or in an embedded form;
• 2011 open source will dominate software infrastructure for cloud-based providers; and
• 2012 Software as a service (SaaS) will eclipse open source as the preferred enterprise IT cost-cutting method

Radcliffe, Fulkerson, and others have argued that the rate of OSS adoption will be much faster. Still, this is proving to be a seminal report. Already it has impacted the thinking of a lot of people in the worlds of OSS and SaaS the same way that Forrester Research's Linux Tipping Point, IDC’s “Open Source Biggest Trend in 20 Years,” and Saugatuck Technology’s “Booming Support for Mission-Critical Application Workloads on Linux” were seminal when they were published in 2006.