The Forrester research confirms my own experiences in talking with CIOs and CTOs: the freedom of source enables innovation that’s otherwise impossible, modular architectures based on transparent, open standards provide greater efficiency and robustness, and competitive vendor offerings that are based on service rather than lock-in deliver competitive value in both time-to-market and quality of implementation. In short, the win-win-win of open source is no longer mere theory, but in evidence throughout the enterprise and around the world.
And, to the extent that IT buyers can exercise choice (when they are not locked into proprietary stacks), they are increasingly exercising the choice to migrate to, and then build their business around, open source software.
Three cheers for freedom!