It has long been said that Open Source software gets an unfair shake in the mainstream market. Speaking personally, I feel that a lot of what this article is saying is brought on by the mistakes that the Open Source community themselves. Having said that, yes, there are some hurdles that do remain and I am personally working as a non-programmer to help with this. Just keep your eyes open. :o)

HP is hoping to persuade analyst firms to change the way that they measure the software market to take into account the open source business model.

Martin Fink, the vice-president of HP’s Linux division, said in a keynote speech at the JBoss World conference in Atlanta on Tuesday that analyst firms are currently under-representing the impact of open source, as their statistics rely on how much companies spend on licence fees. This discriminates against the open source business model where companies make money from support and services, rather than licences.

“Because the business model is changing with open source, they [analyst firms] have to change how they measure market share,” said Fink.

Large analysts firms such as Gartner and IDC claim that the open source application server JBoss has a market share of around 2 percent, but the actual figure is probably much higher, according to Fink.

“This figure [of 2 percent] is really distorted,” said Fink. “We are challenging the industry analyst system to change. Hopefully industry analysts such as IDC and Gartner will do this.”