http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39379900,00.htm "By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms," predicts a Gartner report, /The State of Open Source 2008/, which sees a "stealth" impact for the technology in embedded form: "Users who reject open source for technical, legal or business reasons might find themselves unintentionally using open source despite their opposition." However, Gartner argues that at the operating-system level, Linux deployments are showing smaller benefits in total cost of ownership (TCO) as it is applied to more demanding projects, because of the technical skills required to use it: "Much of the availability, management and DBMS licensing costs will remain proprietary," says the report, and "version control and incompatibilities will continue to plague open-source OSs and associated middleware". "Gartner has woefully underestimated the penetration of open source," said Mark Taylor, president of promotion group the Open Source Consortium. "Everyone uses [open source] on a daily basis in services like Google." [...] IT managers who simply want to cut costs will look to software as a service (SaaS) rather than open source, says the Gartner report. "More technically adventurous IT projects will often prefer the direct use of open source and on-premises software development, but the mainstream IT organisation looking to reduce the IT cost burden will tend to choose SaaS where it is available." This is nothing more than marketing-speak, said Taylor: "It's a very superficial analysis," he said. "The two will become almost indistinguishable as 98 to 99 percent of SaaS will be open source." And Gartner agrees that, by 2011, open source will dominate software infrastructure for cloud-based providers.