The slides from the presentation by the NorthBridge Capital Partners from OSBC has some interesting information. The most interesting finding is that the subscription business model is likely to become much more important in the future. This finding certainly reflects my experience. Most of my open source clients are adopting a subscription model because of its attractiveness to potential customers. http://acquia.com/northbridgesurvey. They also stated that SAAS (among cloud computing, software appliances and virtual infrastructure) is likely to have the greatest effect on software delivery and business models. If SAAS continues to be important it may drive the adoption of the Affero GPL (with its focus on "network use") instead of the GPLv3 (just a reminder that the Affero GPL is simply the GPLv3 with a network use provision added). http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.blogspot.com/2007/11/free-software-foundation-announces.html
The survey confirms the Gartner report that open source will continue to expand rapidly. http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.blogspot.com/2007/09/open-source-paradigm-shift.html According to the survey, more than half (55 percent) of the respondants believe that open source software will increase to 25% to 50% percent of software used as compared with proprietary software. The respondants believed that over the next five years open source software would have the greatest effect in the Web publishing and content management system (CMS) markets, but the least effect in security tools.
http://www.slideshare.net/jwhatcott/annual-future-of-open-source-survey-results-2008/
