open sourceIn its early phases, a piece of open-source software can already be a valuable solution to a business problem — but you’re not going to bet your company on it. However, once it reaches the marketplace and the collective creativity of the open-source community is brought to bear, the maturation process can start. This vast community (which includes not only developers but also customers, vendors, and system integrators) begins openly stress-testing iterations, exploiting strengths and addressing weaknesses, and adding innovative features while removing what doesn’t work.

Over time, bugs are fixed, and the software becomes more reliable, scalable, predictable, and sustainable. It’s enterprise ready.

So who are the principal users of open source — the organizations that are putting

these mature, enterprise-calibre technologies to the test in the real world?

Businesses. Most companies, in tough economic environments as well as in boom

times, are trying to do more with less. An open-source approach to technology enables them to procure, deploy, and manage their IT infrastructures to meet the goal of “better, faster, and cheaper.” And the rate of enterprise adoption of open-source software has been significant: The Open Source Census, a global, collaborative project launched in early 2008, “discovered” more than 300,000 open-source package or project installations in just six months.

And some CIOs have discovered open source in use in their own organizations, even without a corporate standard or mandate. One U.S. bank’s CIO asked for an inventory of the bank’s IT applications and was surprised to find more than 300 of them written on MySQL, an open-source database software for which he did not have a support contract. Fortunately, that was an easy problem to fix.

Governments. In early 2009, the British government mandated the use of open standards (and open source where it’s the least-expensive option), required revision of procurement policies to make open source the equal of other options, and encouraged reuse of developed code — for example, by open sourcing government solutions. And information and communications technology (ICT) providers in Europe, Brazil, and China are working together on a platform to foster the use of open-source technologies in their industry.

How much could open source benefit governments? One online community for government leaders claims that the U.S. government alone could save upward of $20 billion simply by taking an open-source approach to IT. And a European Commission report released in February 2008 estimates that aggressive adoption of open source would increase the gross domestic product of the European Union by .1%, or more than 1 billion.

Students. The next generation of technologists are graduating with a considerable amount of open-source knowledge and experience. With open source, students can study how some of the world’s leading software is crafted, including Sun’s Solaris & Ubuntu Operating Systems, the MySQL database, and the Java platform. Open-source communities offer access to some of the world’s leading software engineers and many of today’s developers feel that they learn more, and faster, by participating in open source communities.

Many students have already been contributors to major open-source projects, and for the most part, they’ve done it as a labour of love — although some have been paid for their contributions. What’s more, they’re excited about the work they perform and they gain a deep sense of satisfaction from their participation within the wider community. So it’s not surprising that when developers at the previously mentioned U.S. bank were asked to quickly develop an important application, they would reach for the software that they knew the best and trusted the most — open-source MySQL software.

How do you thinks open-source applications will fare in 2010?