The Apache Software Foundation is about to celebrate an anniversary, and its extraordinary contribution to the economic refactoring of software stacks seems to be gaining more momentum with every passing year. After three Gartner Data and Analytics events on 3 continents with thousands of attendees in the past 4 weeks, I find myself more impressed than ever by the pervasive interest in and influence of open source software. I had several dozen one-on-one meetings with attendees (many, but not all, Gartner clients), and its appeal and impact on data management was reinforced again and again. Donald Feinberg and I noted in State of the Open-Source DBMS Market, 2018 that
7.6% of DBMS revenue was attributable to OSDBMS-based offerings; a growth rate of 50% over the previous year in a broad market that grew 7.7%. This growth followed on the heels of a doubling in its size during the previous year.
