The 451 Group has found that while many vendors consider small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to be a ‘hot market’ for adopting open source software, the SMB market opportunity for open source software vendors is actually limited. SMB customers are highly cost-conscious and generally lack the IT resources to effectively manage anything beyond the simplest open source software. Easy-to-use open source software can be difficult for software vendors to make money from, but more complex or component-based open source software is unpalatable to the majority of the SMB market, unlike the historical and continuing success of open source software in the enterprise market.
Link: LinuxElectrons.com
