I would agree that there is likely to be an OSS boom this year. But I am going to reserve judgement about Linux adoption on a wide scale in the US for now.

Bob Sutor, IBM’s vice president of standards and open-source, expects a number of industries to embrace open-source software in 2006 — and he expects IBM to play a role in many of those efforts. In an interview with Computerworld last week, Sutor also weighed in on the state of Linux and on Massachusetts’ plans to use the XML-based OpenDocument file format.

What industries do you expect will embrace open-source this year? There will be a continuation in health care and education. I think financial services will have a big year. They’re always looking for efficiencies and greater economies of scale. Retail is another area, as we see a lot of standardization work going on there.

We’re also starting to see more open-source projects that are specific to a particular industry. The Sakai project in education is a good example. It is basically an ERP system for universities. Instead of managing customers, it manages students and courses and allows information-sharing between colleges and universities. [Read the rest]

[tags]education,open source,oss,ibm,computerworld,standards[/tags]