Is open source software likely to be as successful in the consumer market as in the business market?

Answer 1

Probably not. Although I use Linux religiously, it does take some getting used to as mentioned above. Consumers, for the most part, prefer things easy and straight forward. Windows provides exactly that with their GUI based OS. Although I think more and more people are starting to migrate towards browsers such as mozilla and firefox, the primary OS used by the general consumer will remain Windows.

Answer 2

Consumers of software products are from different walks of life. How successful a product would be in consumer market would depend on how easy is it to use. Now the question if open source software can be successful or not, would again depend on ease of use for general consumer of the product. Does it matter to end user who generally would not bother about the source code if the product is open source or not? In my opinion it would not. The travesty has been that not many open source product has not been as successful as the products that are not open source. It cannot be attributed to product not being good or stable, rather it is largely for the reason that most of the open source software lack features and ease of use. One more reason could be marketing. So if not many company take up open source policy for their product, how do you expect such product to be in market. Though there has been a few open source software product (firefox, thunderbird) which have earned good name, but not many software company follow open source policy (in consumer market)
It is quite often mistaken that open source = free software. The huge advantage of open source is that, the source code is accessible and other people can study and point out if there is any flaw in the code, or improve it. The point is how many people would do it for sheer passion without any profit?
If more companies profess Open source policy I am sure that future for open source is bright, and there is no reason why such products would not be a success in consumer market. So consumers are not the one to decide if the future is for open source or not but its left to the companies which offer software products.

--
Ck
http://www.gfour.net

Answer 3

If it's better than the commerical product, yes. Firefox, Apache, Red Hat Linux and OSCommerce are all wildly successful, for example.

Answer 4

No. Open source technology has a slight learning curve and is not catered towards what most consumers want.

Answer 5

It already is.
You can run your entire business and perosnal computers without buying one pice of software if you so choose.