The heterogeneous world of proprietary and open-source software
Stacy Avery Baird · 2008
Understanding the evolution of a complex, competitive environment is always easier in hindsight, but today's CIOs and government policymakers don't have the luxury of retrospection when it comes to the volatile world of enterprise software. High-caliber decisions require a clear-sighted, non-dogmatic grasp of the contexts in which government enterprises today deploy both proprietary and open-source software in heterogeneous IT environments. This article addresses the topic, and describes ways in which proprietary and open-source software developers are drawing upon each other's development, licensing and business models. The article illustrates how today's IT world is no longer an "either/or" world in which customers and vendors chose to be either proprietary or open source. Instead, it is an attractive world of "both/and" as the lines between proprietary and open source have, making interoperable deployments almost inevitable in many if not most cases.