This IDC study provides a top-down sizing of revenue from standalone open source software (OSS) in 2006 and a 2007–2011 forecast for this market. Historical and forecast revenue data is shown for total worldwide standalone OSS. This study does not contain vendor-specific revenue, market shares, or vendor profiles.

"IDC believes that the market for standalone open source software is in a significant growth stage," said Matt Lawton, program director of IDC's Open Source Software Business Models research program. "The market is still quite immature, especially now that we see active open source projects in all layers of the software stack. Although we see healthy growth in revenue from standalone open source software, we must keep in mind that revenue will substantially lag behind the distribution of open source software. Many distributions of standalone open source software are free, while paid distributions typically are based on pay-as-you-go subscriptions rather than pay-up-front license fees."