The Open Learning Centre

A report published by the Standish Group has found that Open-source software is successfully displacing proprietary applications in many large companies and eating into the annual revenues of proprietary software vendors by $60bn (£30bn) a year.

According to the study called Trends in Open Source, released this week, the losses of proprietary software makers are disproportionate to the actual spend on open-source software, which is a mere six percent of an estimated worldwide spend of $1 trillion per year. The researchers put this difference down to the fact that a large proportion of open source isn't paid for, an intended result of the open-source licensing structure...

The open-source community's programmer-hours, if added up, would place it as the largest software employer in the world, the study said. The firm found that open-source software, once used primarily for low-level needs, has moved up the chain. Open source is often brought in to cover a project's basic requirements; creating a "baseline", using the terms of the report. But increasingly often, no further proprietary software is needed to fulfil more advanced requirements, the report found.

Read the full story here from zdnet.