Gartner held its big open-source summit conference in Las Vegas last week. Mark Driver led off one of the opening session with the statement that "By 2011, at least 80% of commercial software will contain significant amounts of open source code." That led to this unavoidable Network World article and corresponding Slashdot flaming battle of words.

From the conference, you will see other publicity along the lines of "Gartner declared open-source software the biggest disruptor the software industry has ever seen and postulated it will eventually result in cheaper software and new business models." (eWeek)

Gartner reports that open-source products accounted for a 13 percent share of the $92.7 billion software market in 2006, but should account for 27 percent of the market in 2011 when revenue is expected to be $169.2 billion, according to Gartner research.

PushToTest is one of those open-source companies. PushToTest provides a commercial licenese to the PushToTest TestMaker environment that is a fraction what what you will pay for HP/Mercury Interactive products. PushToTest, established in 2001, provides professional support, service, training, and global services to make you successful with TestMaker solutions. So I tend to agree with Gartner.

The other advantage that Gartner didn't really get into is the fast pace of change in the Web application, SOA, Ajax and Web 2.0 areas. Leveraging the power of our open-source community means you have 140,000 software engineers at work keeping TestMaker bug-free and relevant to your needs. PushToTest TestMaker provides more protocol handlers, more record/playback options, more support for SOA, Web service, Ajax, and Web 2.0 applications, and faster response from the engineers that actually code TestMaker than any other test automation environment. I don't see being able to do keep up with this change without using open-source.

-Frank