What is the future of open source?
Currently, the wide scale adoption of open source software and open formats remains, in comparison with proprietary alternatives, rather low. The follow-the-crowd mentality is a reasonable strategy for ensuring the longevity of one’s resources: if there are enough people with a vested interest in continued support for a particular software product then there are attractive profits to be made by commercial companies from ensuring it remains available. However, open source is more easily curated and this must be distinguished from the incentives created by societal demand for curation that more popular formats enjoy. With the popularity of open source software like OpenOffice.org on the increase, soon a larger demand will be in evidence for the curation of more open formats. The transparency underpinning them will allow this demand to be more straightforwardly satisfied than for proprietary equivalents. Ultimately most users will consider the adoption of open source only if the tools the
