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Open Source: A Technology Trend that keeps Growing

Sunando Banerjee
Channel Business Manager, APAC & Middle East-Openbravo
Friday, July 26, 2013
Sunando Banerjee
Openbravo is an open source ISV focused on business management applications. Their web based ERP and POS solutions have been downloaded over a million times and are used in over 50 countries. They have received $18 Million from Sodena Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, Adara Venture Partners and Gimv.

The history of Open Source, the movement and the broad philosophy, are well documented and discussed online by devotees and critics alike, but we believe this model has now come of age, moved on and evolved considerably from its initial ‘ethical software’ roots.

It started as a platform for the emerging revenue models but now the open source movement is being tipped for even greater impact on tomorrow's technologies.

Open source began as a platform for a small community with the idea of sharing and a set of ideals about software development, a belief that developers should make their products more expedient and user-friendly by making the underlying code accessible to everyone. As the open source software movement has grown, the fundamental tenets have proven its merits. As a result, now open source is being adopted not only from Government but also by some of the largest corporations in the world.

Far from being a new phenomenon, Open Source software development has matured over more than two decades of online refinement. Not only has this model proved itself many times over to be successful commercially, it has also begun staking a claim for considerable market share in the business software market. It has been able to produce bulletproof, flexible systems and applications that can be applied up to true enterprise level. One such example is the mobile platform; open source developers launched 15,000 Android mobile projects in 2012, representing a 96 percent increase over 2011. By contrast, iOS developers launched nearly 2,500 open source projects for Apple's mobile platform, a 32 percent increase year over year, which is not too bad when you consider that the Apple App Store is not particularly friendly for open source.


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