So today, I read that Gartner has finally jumped on the open source bandwagon. I honestly thought this was a hold over April Fools joke. Seriously.

Last week, while I was at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Super Computing Center in Austin Texas, I was surprised to find that if I had wanted to cover the week’s most surprising Linux-related news, I should at been at the Gartner Conference in Las Vegas where two Gartner analysts declared, “Windows Is Collapsing.”

An analysis of the Gartner Group and BSA based on some news (cumulative exploration of promotion by proxy)

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.

I received Gartner e-mail this week marketing their up-coming open-source summit. The message contains gems that illuminate Gartner's perspective on open source and the larger IT world.

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.

Gartner has made 10 technology predictions for the next few years, and in the analyst firm's view, life has never been better for open source. Among the predictions: Apple will double its market share by 2011 and software-as-service will account for at least one-third of all business software spending by 2012.

At least 80 percent of all commercial software products will include elements of open-source code by 2010, according to Mark Driver, vice president of research at Gartner.

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.