Open Source a billion dollar market

AS THE SUN sets on Etre 2006 here in New Barcelona, we decided to attend the Open Source roundtable rather than the Web 2.0 one. We'd never have got a seat and we wouldn't have understood it anyway.

Getting your head around Open Source is a bit easier, and according to Bernard Dalle, from VC firm Index Ventures the movement, if you can still call it a movement, is accelerating like there's no tomorrow.

He said there are around 120,000 Open Source projects up and running. "We're not asking ourselves whether we can make money out of open source any more," he said.

And better than that, it's "a billion dollar market, going at a 40 or 50 per cent rate".

Just a few years back, people asked themselves whether there was ever any way people could make money out of open source, but no one is asking that question any more, plus the quality of the code is excellent.

Josep Mitja, chief operating officer of Openbravo, said he thought that every category of software that is becoming a commodity will end up open source eventually. His firm concentrates on the ERP category for small and medium businesses.

You can make money out of ERP too, he said. He pointed to SugarCRM as an example of a firm that was open source, but still profitable.

Openbravo is a comparatively young company, but its ERP software is downloadable for free, while it is able to offer service and support for its paying users.

The interesting thing here is that Open Sauce doesn't have the media buzz it had two, three or more years ago, but it's obviously come into its own. Like China, it's a sleeping giant no more.