This post was mentioned on Twitter by mjasay: Gartner: Enterprise IT, not ISVs, may be the future of open-source enterprise applications: http://bit.ly/3hvgu8...

Q2 – No. But it doesn’t take all companies to do this for an impact to occur. It only takes enough.
Q3 – Did I say that?
Q4 – Why not? If there are shared value chain system dependencies and the economics make sense it would seem foolish not to do this. It a group of software vendors are willing to contribute to an OSS operating system project in order avoid the shared problem posed by Microsoft’s dominance then why wouldn’t companies like GE and Nabisco work together on something like a supply chain solution if they were both confronted with expensive and intransigent relationships with their business application providers?

Q1 – why not?

All companies are going to take the same approach some software companies did?

Open Source keeps me from paying for software support and maintenance?

GE and Nabisco are going to hire a bunch of developers and partner on an open source project?