40 percent of IT jobs will be in open source

By 2020, the cloud will have taken over, and open source will rule in the cloud - with the result that 40 percent of IT jobs will be related to open source, according to a roadmap launched yesterday.

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" - ie the open source nirvana only happens if we work for it now.

There's 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.