On the death of proprietary enterprise management tools
In Consumer Empowered Enterprise - Zero Gravity Surendra Reddy argues that proprietary Management tools are doomed ..
There is no doubt in my mind that IT Management tools sold by majority of framework vendors five years from now will be built upon an Open Source foundation. The real questions are how long it will take to get there, and how difficult will the transition be for their customers. The sooner these framework vendors embarks on this journey, the easier the transition. Here are some reasons why such an Open Source foundation makes sense. More and more customers express concerns regarding the prospect of delegating the responsibility of building and maintaining critical piece of their IT infrastructure to any single vendor. The lower you move through the IT stack, the least customers are willing to accept any kind of vendor locking, which is one of the reasons why the Linux operating system has been so successful. Above the operating system lies the management stack and this is the next layer of the stack that customers will demand be open sourced.
If you look at projects such as OpenNMS, where experts from the proprietary world got fed up and started building an open source alternative over 4 years ago, it's only now that these kind of statements are gaining acceptance.
Probably because it's not only true in the enterprise management world anymore but also in other fields such as document management and others..