40 percent of IT jobs will be in open source, study

The FLOSS 2020 roadmap, announced at the Open World Forum in Paris, gives a set of predictions of where IT will be in 2020. It then gives recommendations - admitting in the process that the recommendations are "formulated in the hope that these predictions will come true" - i.e. the open source nirvana only happens if we work for it now.

There are 78 pages of the report, and it goes into some very sensible public policy recommendations (ban software patents etc) along with ideas for education and corporate governance.

It also makes the interesting point that in moving to the mainstream via cloud computing, the actual code that is the basis of open source will be further hidden from the user. This is an inevitable part of the move to the mainstream, but some will see it as a "dilution" of open source.

This will be worth looking at in more depth.