10 - The Future of the Open Source Movement

Summary

This chapter attempts to present a balanced view of what the future seems likely to hold for the open source movement based on past and present trends and the underlying structural, social, political, scientific, and economic forces at work. We will first sketch what we believe are the likely dominant modes for software development and then we will elaborate on the rationales for our projections.

First of all, we believe the open source paradigm is moving inexorably toward worldwide domination of computer software infrastructure. Its areas of dominance seem likely to include not only the network and its associated utilities, but also operating systems, desktop environments, and the standard office utilities. Significantly, it seems that precisely the most familiar and routine applications will become commoditized and satisfied by open source implementations, facilitating pervasive public recognition of the movement. The software products whose current dominance seems likely to decline because of this transformation include significant components of the Microsoft environment from operating systems to office software.

However, despite a likely widespread increase in the recognition, acceptance, and use of open source, this does not imply that open software will dominate the entire universe of software applications. The magnitude of financial resources available to proprietary developers is enormous and increasing, giving such corporations a huge advantage in product development. One might note, for example, that expenditures on research and development by publicly traded software companies increased tenfold between 1986 and 2000, from 1 to 10% of industrial research expenditures (Evans, 2002).