Open source fuels growth of cloud computing, SaaS

Open source software is critical to the growth of both software-as-a-service and cloud computing, and cloud-based computing in turn is making it easier for open source vendors to lower costs, the analyst firm Saugatuck says in a new research note.

SaaS providers are flocking to open source for the same reasons as enterprise IT shops -- acquisition and licensing costs that are 80% lower than comparable proprietary offerings. Open source vendors also are gaining strength from cloud computing models, such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, which make processing, storage and other IT services available over the Web on a pay-per-use basis. (Compare storage products.)

"Saugatuck sees the development and growth of open source and SaaS for enterprise infrastructure and business software as inextricably intertwined," analyst Bruce Guptill writes. "They feed off each other's strengths, but create weaknesses in each other as well."

Specifically, SaaS vendors may run into trouble when they ignore open source licensing issues related to the General Public License (GPL). "What too many SaaS vendors don't seem to understand is the extremely long tail of open source software," one executive at an open source business intelligence vendor told Saugatuck.

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