ComputerWorld is reporting that Gartner predicted all businesses will use open-source software in just 12 months. It is certainly an interesting prediction, but, as with many of these, I think the headline is a little misleading.

All this means is that in a year just about every business will be using some piece of open-source software somewhere. In other words, a giant corporation that uses a piece of open-source software in some tiny department somewhere would count, even if all their other software was proprietary. Thinking of it that way certainly makes the prediction a lot more believable, but it does not make it irrelevant.

The big deal here is really that it means that just about every IT department will have had at least a little experience with open-source software. You can’t guarantee that this experience will make it to higher levels or that it will be entirely positive, but just a little bit of experience with open-source software can certainly help to eliminate doubts.

The idea is that once a company tries a little bit of open-source software, they will be open (pun possibly intended) to the possibility of trying open-source software again. If the company’s experiences are consistently positive, this could lead to a company adopting open-source for more major roles, even if they started with something small.

While this prediction might not be as monumental as it might seem, it does matter and it is good news. A more interesting statistic might be how much each company likes the open-source software they use and if they consider it to play a major role in their jobs?

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