When was the last time you decided to rope in open source to help you out of a software requirement?
With the growing pressure to perform and the ongoing requirements from the customers, is it any wonder that you give 'search' a different meaning? Whenever a requirement comes up, we look up on the Internet to check whether there is matching software available from the Open source stable. Mark Driver, Vice President of Research at Gartner says, "At least 80 percent of all commercial software products will include elements of open-source code by 2010". If this is the case, it should be optimizing your work at least by a degree of 80%!
This is indicative of the current trend in the development world, specifically in ICT departments that crowd the corporate offices.
Almost every new requirement that a company runs into, whether it is an SME or a large-scale unit, you will find a 'fragment' available somewhere that matches your need. As Driver said, it is true that fragmentation in Open source is not a drawback and is certainly not a threat. Fragmentation, on the other hand, appears more as strength of Open source.
In the days to come, the changes that are needed will be more intricate and minor in most of the software. This is because the software development has grown largely covering almost all the aspects of business. When there is a change requested by a client or a user, it will be an infinitesimal addition to the existing code. The best and the optimal way of doing that will be to look for a fragment that will satisfy the need. The fragments could be the straight plug and play software modules that can go on your open source code.
With more and more open source code available on standard proprietary platform coming up, it is no wonder that you find the right kind of software fragment for every requirement that you might come up against.
With all the changes happening in organizations like Drupal, look for the performance and the optimization of work that open source brings along with the cost saving that goes with it.
 

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