Just got this snippet in an email from a friend...

IDC released a report -- "The use of open source beyond Linux is pervasive, used by almost three-quarters of organizations and spanning hundreds of thousands of projects," said Dr. Anthony Picardi, senior vice president of Global Software Research at IDC. "Although open source will significantly reduce the industry opportunity over the next ten years, the real impact of open source is to sustain innovations in mature software markets, thus extending the useful life of software assets and saving customers money." ...seems almost right until you get to the last sentence (I apologize in advance if I'm taking this out of context).

Seems to me that we're not exactly extending the life of existing software assets with open source. If anything, we are accelerating our way out of existing software assets and replacing them with open source alternatives. In the process, we're adding back some innovation into application areas that need it. I know a lot about a company called Intalio (I'm on the board there), and they are doing a terrific job in the Business Process Management (BPM) space with an open source alternative. They've already had contributions from their community that represent some very important new ideas - like making BPM systems more real time.

As this process continues, it looks to me like the OSS alternatives will get much more interesting than the maintainance releases on old applications.