Open source is ready to take on the business world and adoption is growing.
This was the belief of Canonical, the creators of Ubuntu, which held an event in London yesterday celebrating how open source can help businesses to grow.
"This isn't a notional side project run by people in their spare time," said Gerry Carr, head of platform marketing for Canonical.
"There are real businesses here in the UK and across the world... building their business on top of Ubuntu and open source... not solely for the purity but because they can bring real business benefits to their organisations."
There was large support for what open source software could do by the gathered evangelists but the major factor seemed to be making businesses accept change to something less familiar.
Chris Puttick, chief information officer (CIO) at Oxford Archeological, said the familiarity of products might hold people back but you must force employees to accept a new way.
"Expect resistance at the point of which you remove the old applications," he said. "You have to forcibly remove them."
"You don't need best [applications], you need one that does the job, you move on. For so many years [they] have been sold as 'buy new versions, buy new features'... we don't need new features, we need to use the features you have got."
Ed Beckmann, business coach at DSNetworx, took a different approach, claiming the best way was to first seek out the problems people have with switching over to open source.
"If there is no open source alternative, we have to accept that," he said, "but ask around and see where the rsistance would be... what you need to do is take a full step back and ask what do we need to do."
Most of the spokespeople focused on the use of both Ubuntu and open source in small and medium-sized business environments but others tried to prove it was being utilised by large enterprises as well.
Jeff Nott, sales director at Alfresco, said even the analysts are starting to recommend open source software and big companies had shown their support too.
In addition to AQA and Yell in the UK, he said: "SAP, sixth largest software business in the world... rolled it out to 50,000 employees worldwide to use it. They must really think this open source is good enough."
The one problem agreed on was the fact that open source enthusiasts are not always on the same page.
Carr concluded: "I did initially write [in my presentation] we are like minded people but were not. We are all kind of working in the same direction [but] going off course every now and again."
