The latest annual survey on the future of open source from North Bridge Venture Partners reveals that customers predicting that 25 – 50% of their software purchases could be open source within five years. The survey also showed that 80% of respondents saying that economic “turbulence,” which is a polite way of saying “recession,” would boost the prospects for open source.

Admittedly, the sample for the survey, which includes attendees of InfoWorld’s annual Open Source Business Conference and customers of several sponsoring firms, is obviously skewed toward open source. Nonetheless, the survey provided some interesting insights on the direction of the market and who is likely to own it.

And for the latter point, the conclusion of the survey could easily borrow a line from an old song by The Who that goes, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” That’s because well over half the 200+ respondents indicated that either “platform” vendors like Oracle, Sun, IBM, and SAP, or “conglomerates” like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo (a curious juxtaposition) would command the majority of open source software revenue by 2012. In other words, open source would not change the pecking order of the software industry, although, roughly two-thirds of the sample said that another open source company with “the stature of Red Hat” is likely to emerge by that time.

As to which kinds of software are most likely to be open sourced, the results were for the most part not surprising. Web publishing and content management, social networking, and business intelligence were considered the sectors most likely to be “disrupted” by open source, whereas configuration management, portals, and security tools were likely to be least affected. About the only surprises were that BI would be impacted, whereas portals wouldn’t be.

As to why customers like open source, by far the top reason was lower cost. But runner-up was access to code, a factor that we believe was probably skewed by the nature of the sample: those who would pay to go to an open source conference. The fact is that access to source code implies an active customer who wants to mess with the code and tweak it, which doesn't really reflect the mainstream of the enterprise software market.

One interesting point concerned software delivery. By far, SaaS (Software a s a Service) was seen as the leading disruptive factor, and one likely to lower the barriers to open source penetration. By contrast, cloud computing, which applies SaaS to compute infrastructure, was ranked far down the list. However, recent reports of high VC interest in cloud computing indicate that next year it will likely rank much higher on the list.

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