In a few years' time, almost all businesses will use open source, according to Gartner; even though IT managers may be unaware of it, and prefer to talk about fashions such as software as a service.

I'm not sure who Gartner talks to when it puts together its famous "Hype Cycle" reports, but I'm finding it hard to believe that it talks with enterprises. I was recently reading through its "Hype Cycle for Open-Source Software, 2007" report, and was astounded to find out that I've been tricked by paying customers into believing that they were, well, paying.

There seems to be a continual push to make sure everyone knows that Microsoft is alive and well at the expense of what is really going on in the IT world with Linux. Gartner has done studies that demonstrate based on their data that Microsoft continues to advance in the number of servers deployed.