The cover story in the Nov. 17 issue of Information Week is titled The Open Source Enterprise.  A few highlights:

"In an economic slowdown that's getting worse, open source matters, now more than ever...

What open source has long promised, and is only starting to deliver consistently to business, is an alternative both cheaper and more effective than proprietary code...

And being lightweight can be its own advantage, rather than throwing ever-more software and servers at     a problem. With its transparent and standards-based development, open source code can cut the complexity and risk of custom coding for integration or niche needs."

If your managment is still concerned about whether an open source test automation solution is safe, secure, and reliable, you might want to point out this article. 

If you've been following along, by now you know that WatirCraft is a major contributor to the ongoing development of Watir.  Many of the fixes and enhancements over the past six months have been a direct result of Bret's 100% dedication to the project, and more recently the involvement of Jim Matthews, all funded by WatirCraft.

Going forward, we'd like to hear from as many Watir users as possible about what features or capabilities you'd like to see in Watir in 2009 and beyond.  How can we make Watir easier to use, more productive, or better in any way?  What should our priorities be?

To that end, we've added another channel for feedback.  We hope you will go to the Watir page on Uservoice, register, and start entering your suggestions and voting.

Fair warning: we may choose to implement your suggestions in either open-source Watir or in a commercial (not free) add-on from WatirCraft.  We hope you'll agree this is fair, because WatirCraft will need some revenue as a company to fund our ability to continue actively supporting open-source Watir development.   Seem reasonable?

So - what do you need most from Watir that you're not getting right now? 

Yesterday Gartner reported that 85% of companies surveyed in May and June acknowledged they are using open source software (OSS), and the other 15% plan to start in the next 12 months.  OSS has clearly gone mainstream. 

The top reason cited was lower total cost of ownership.  I suspect that OSS adoption will broaden and deepen quickly if the economic slowdown persists. 

But as companies gain experience, other compelling reasons for using OSS will become apparent.   Things like reduced adoption risk, reduction in vendor dependence, access to code, higher quality...

We'll be watching the Watir downloads and gem installs over the coming months to see if I'm right.

"Last week we released Watir 1.6.2. This is a big release with a lot of new features and fixes, but the focus has been integrating the Watir and FireWatir code bases and improving our support for Firefox. Earlier this year we put both projects under the same umbrella. This release significantly improves compatibility. Many of our users are finding that they can now run all or nearly all of their tests on both IE and Firefox."  See the full text of Bret's announcement here.