Highlights from late last week include:

• Is your CMS grown-up and nimble? Open Source Content Management - mature and agile for today’s needs (Optaros.com)
• Do you think BillG knows? Microsoft: We’re Open (Source) For Business (internetnews.com)
• Don’t step in the Mooshup: WSO2 open source mashup builder leverages JavaScript (InformationWeek)
• Say it ain’t so: The freewheeling days of open source are numbered (InfoWorld Daily)
• What’s all the FOSS? HP Launches Open Source Governance Initiative (ChannelWeb)

My pick for the enterprise open source item of last week takes a little setup. On Thursday, Microsoft beat forecasts for fiscal 2008 Q@ results, reporting $16.37B in revenues against analyst consensus estimates of $15.95B — beating the estimate by $420M, or 2.6%.

Let’s consider what that $420M estimate error mean in the open source world. For example, here are recent quarterly revenues from open source activities at three publicly-traded companies:

Red Hat (RHT) $135M 11/30/07
Novell (NOVL) $22M 10/31/07 Per CNet
IBM (IBM) $135M 12/31/07 Estimated from InfoWorld’s “Has Open Source Sold Out?”

That’s $392M of open source revenue from three major software vendors– still less that the analyst’s margin of error for Microsoft’s revenues in the same period. It’s a comparison that would give any financially-oriented software exec something to think about.

We all know MSFT is huge — really huge. And open source revenues are still small — really small. That might seem intimidating to some, but to me, it means enterprise open source has a lot of room to grow without taking on Microsoft directly. That’s probably good news for everyone.

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This entry was posted by Ryck on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 11:23 pm and is filed under Community, Enterprise open source, Open Source projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.