Canadian IT managers have to get over their inertia if open source software is to make more headway in the corporate enterprise, experts told the Real World Linux 2004 conference in April.
While open source software such as Linux has made significant inroads in some areas of large companies,
like Web servers and databases, most enterprises have shied away from testing open source on mainframes or the desktop, said Anne Lotz-Turner, senior advocate for open source with the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance.
John Hall, an evangelist on behalf of Linux International, said one of open source’s challenges may be demographic — there’s a growing proportion of IT people who weren’t in the industry before 1980, and are accustomed to pre-packaged software.
In the old days, companies paid for most application development work and afterwards owned the software and could ask others to change it.