A survey being released today at an open source conference in San Francisco shows that 56 percent of respondents predict that more than half of the software purchases made by businesses and other enterprises over the next five years will be of open source software. The organizers of the Open Source Business Conference 2011 say that this is because customers have overcome their reluctance toward using open source, such as concerns about licenses, and are embracing its virtues, such as flexibility, lower cost and avoiding vendor lock-in. The survey also identifies growth opportunities for open source in the software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing and mobile markets, which are growth areas for IT in general.
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