Predictions 2012 – The View From an Open Source Foundation

Paula Hunter | Open Source Delivers | January 11, 2012

Open source projects will be smaller, with fewer contributors – but there will be more new projects. Large, multi-vendor projects such as OpenStack are typically formed in the early stages of an emerging market. There have been a number of new collaborations around cloud technologies, but the growth this year will be in more focused OSS projects that complement and extend technology shifts. At the same time, as some of the larger OSS projects mature, there is also a concern about contributor attrition, since ongoing maintenance and improvements are more vendor specific and less interesting to developers...

Projects aimed at improving health IT will continue to spark interest, and those funded and fostered at the government level have the best chance of widespread adoption. Some of the largest healthcare initiatives are open source, and funded at the federal level for several years to come. Thus they can ride out the financial and regulatory uncertainty currently plaguing our HC industry. I do expect that on the back end of these projects there is great commercial opportunity.

There will be some minor consolidation in the FOSS non-profit foundation space, but steady growth in the use of the largest and well funded foundations to jumpstart key projects.

Strong project leadership skills will grow in value. As projects grow, mature, and in some cases flounder, a critical success factor will be the strength of the project leader(s) in holding together a core team of devoted contributors and establishing a succession plan. We have seen instances where a project looses steam when there is change at the “top”, but that does not have to be the case. Having strong OSS project leadership credentials is an important asset and a highly marketable skill...