In Google’s recent announcement on their open source partnerships with open source database companies they linked to this interview with a Gartner analyst.
https://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/feature/Open-sou…
It is a multi page article so you can navigate to other pages as well, but this is the page they linked to because of this paragragh.
Open source DBMS software is on the rise, Gartner analysts Merv Adrian and Donald Feinberg said in a February 2018 report. They predict that by 2022, more than 70% of new applications developed by corporate users will run on an open source database management system, and that half of the existing relational database installations built on commercial DBMS technologies will be converted to open source platforms or in the process of being converted.
That’s four years later than an earlier Gartner projection, which foresaw those usage levels being reached in 2018. But the report points to high growth rates for open source database revenues in recent years, as well as a “profound shift” in development and software packaging among vendors to put more emphasis on the use of open source technology.
Legacy database systems are in the midst of a disruption, though Gartner has shifted their target a few years. But that’s good because much of the disruption is still in front of us. They say in the article that open source will account for just 10% of the database revenue in 2019.
Open source is an enabler of this disruption. It allows for a no or low cost foothold for proof of concept to test an experiment before going into a full production mode which in many if not most cases will lead to a commercial product.
Open source is the evolution, it’s the way things are, and in order to be competitive, vendors will have to be open source. I would expect legacy vendors to become more open source than open source vendors to become more closed source. The article supports that idea. There will be some licensing shifting as companies try to protect their IP from being forked or copied. But to shift too far from open source will be to abandon the very thing that drives their market. The foothold.
Darth