If you haven’t heard already - Microsoft has made a major leap forward towards open source. See this article from O’Reilly Radar.

I am not sure if the right words are “leap forward towards open source”. I think it is more of an acceptance of open source. There are far too many applications, OS, products on open source. From a pure ecnonomics MS is never going to be able to compete with the price point that open source provides - free or near free. And no matter what, the legions of open source programmers are not going away.

I am a very happy open source user. While I haven’t donated money back to any open source projects (when I went to give OpenOffice some money they would accept only PayPal), I have become a huge proponent of open source and am regularly recommending it to my customers (if it meets their needs).

I am not sure what to make of the approach MS is taking with open source. You can read more about it on their new open source site. They are touting VS Studio Express edition and MS SQL Server Express editions. Which is great that those products are free and available to everyone, but the real power of open source is that the source code is available freely too (under GPL or some other open source license).

My prediction - over the coming years, most if not all the software applications will be a) hosted (which means annual subscription); and b) be available as a free basic version, along with two or three paid versions, each stair stepping the prices higher.

If you are interested in learning more about our authors, you can choose from the list to the right. An avid developer and technology leader, Amol helps marketers with CRM, e-mail marketing & automation. Most recently, Amol was responsible for an open API at leading email marketing firm ExactTarget. He is currently the VP of Technology at Right On Interactive. Read more from this author

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