For Commercial Software Firms in 2011, Open Source is Ripe for Picking

While our recent roundup of 2010’s biggest open source events emphasized the fact that two large, public U.S. companies focused primarily on open source–Sun Microsystems and Novell–lost their independence, 2011 promises to be the year that open source takes on massive appeal to commercial software companies and entrepeneurs who want to build companies. In fact, the flip side of Sun and Novell losing their independence is that they did so because they had appeal to established companies: Oracle and Attachmate, respectively. Open source software components are now frequently showing up in commercial software products, but commercial software companies in 2011 won’t just integrate FOSS components, they’ll build businesses around open source software.