Future

The Future of Software development

Microsoft is acknowledging the potential threat of losing market-share to open source products. For instance the open source MySQL has made Microsoft stop and think. Microsoft is currently investigating to open more if it’s current sources to prove the stability of windows 2003, and might open up completely on their SQL Server to show no hidden backdoors are there. This shows that Microsoft is carefully seeing the potential that open source offers. At the same time Microsoft is continuing to "fight" open source, with arguments like: we don’t see a viable business model for open source yet.

The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution warns governmental institutions to not use open source software for national security information. Although it seems that this institution is largely funded by Microsoft. Could this be one of the ways Microsoft is fighting open source?

For the future I see the debate going on, no clear direction is taken, although it seems Microsoft is coming closer towards open source activists by opening some of its sources. Microsoft will be in worse weather for the coming years. More and more contracts for governmental institutions are lost to open source initiatives! (The city of Munich just transferred all windows PC's to Linux.)

In the future according to statistics and the CEO of Red Hat Microsoft is losing more and more territory on the server based infrastructure. Currently 50% of the online servers are Linux based, and 75% of the web servers are based upon the open source Apache server in stead of Microsoft’s Internet Information Server. Windows will probably remain to be the number one desktop system for office and home, but this could change quite quickly for instance with a huge marketed introduction of an easy to use Linux distribution.