Eric S. Raymond
Programmer, author, and
open source software advocate

Raymond: That's really too general a question to answer. It's too much like asking "Where do you see electricity going in the next five years?"

Dave Rosenberg
CEO and co-founder
Mulesource

Rosenberg: We’ve already seen the open source development model applied to areas far beyond software. We’ve also seen proprietary companies adopt similar development and distribution tactics to get closer to the user base.

I expect wide-scale adoption of open source in mission-critical applications as open source products continue to mature. I also expect the market opportunities to increase as we see more “closed” companies start to move further into open standards and development models.

Open source is no longer a matter of “if” but instead, a matter of “when.”

Zack Urlocker
Vice president of products
MySQL

Urlocker: I think there's nothing but growth. Open source is an unstoppable force. We'll look back in 10 years and consider closed-source software to have been a weird anomaly. "You mean you paid millions for software without knowing if it would work?"

Young folks starting their careers in IT are already experts in open source; they've been using it for most of their college life. For managers and older developers, I think these are important skills to have. Just like you couldn't get ahead in the late 1990s without Web development experience, I think we're going to see the same trend around open source. These will be the necessary technical skills for career development.

We'll see more and more adoption of open source. The barriers to adoption are so small that it doesn't really make sense to launch new companies without using this approach. I think we'll also see huge growth in software-as-a-service and on-demand applications fueled by open source.

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