COMMENT
It's a perfect time for open source proponents to put down their 'Microsoft Bad, Open Source Good' banners and start addressing the concerns of large enterprises and government agencies, says Simon Moores.
My last column on open source provoked the inevitable remarks I've come to expect every time I pop my head above the parapet, take a deep breath and attempt to take an objective look at the progress of open source software (OSS), which I've been doing since I was one of the first columnists to take an interest in 'penguin' evolution.
Once again, I expect to be shot down in flames by the open source groupies. I sometimes wonder if the author Salman Rushdie gives an occasional sigh of relief that he wrote the Satanic Verses and not a column on Linux.
OSS enthusiasts may be pleased to hear that following a well-attended Westminster presentation by my colleague Dr Mohammed Al-Ubaydli of the Conservative Technology Forum, entitled "Open source software for government", I'm involved in a project to explore the practical application of OSS to deliver integrated and workable public sector solutions - in particular using bottom-up OSS in the health service to help rescue a still shaky-looking National Programme for IT (NPfIT).
It's now 2006, over seven years since I first started writing on this subject, and what continues to worry me about the open source debate is that objectivity is still blurred by an emotional attachment to one side of the argument or another which is more commonly found in hardened football supporters.
From the evidence around us, this should be the year (once again) where the OSS argument achieves a critical mass and credibility, supported by the evidence of its success across the entire IT spectrum.
For this to happen, the movement's more vocal proponents need to leave the emotional baggage of 'Microsoft Bad, Open Source Good' behind and concentrate on resolving the central themes of the OSS case in a way which satisfies not just cynical columnists like me but the big enterprise and government customers. These are the very organisations that could make a real difference to its future as a sensible and commercially sound technology alternative.
For this to happen, then, we need to recognise the fundamental differences in the Linux and Windows models and accept that while there are advantages in the OSS componentisation model, there are a number of valid potential customer objections which are expressed in the complexity, management and cost of maintaining an OSS environment.
For medium sized-organisations, for instance, OSS still presents many challenges which most frequently involve a poorer grasp of OSS benefits, resource constraints and the worry over what is perceived as a brutal costs-penalty incurred in any move away from a Windows environment.
As Winston Churchill said, "If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future." This is a sentiment that can just as easily be applied to the TCO/ROI debate which Microsoft and IBM have used successfully to muddy the OSS argument to a degree that it's very hard to establish what it true.
A great deal of time and money has been spent on whether to focus on TCO, the total cost of ownership of running specific workloads, or trying to gauge the ROI (return on investment) - invariably a rather abstract metric.
Both are less factors of the underlying operating system than the applications and services that support the servers. Server choices are dictated by the application and TCO in particular doesn't properly examine the real savings and flexibility that one server platform or another may offer.
These are just a few of the issues we need to see clearly resolved in 2006 if OSS is going to make real headway. It's no longer a question of a seismic event which sees Microsoft going the way of the dinosaurs. Instead it's visibly becoming an evolutionary process which supports an uneasy co-existence and recognises the arrival of OSS as a major software technology.
The only real question in my mind is how long it will take Linux to pass the critical 30 per cent server market share figure, the same question that I asked in 1999. Leaving the last word to Winston Churchill: "I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else."
Comments
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1. Tony Wasserman
I found this article to be quite narrow in the discussion of open source. Linux is already a foregone conclusion, widely deployed in server rooms around the world, with extensive vendor support.
To me, open source goes way beyond the operating system. Open source software such as OpenOffice, Firefox, Apache, Eclipse, sendmail, and others are also in widespread use, with more than 100 million downloads of Firefox. This year I expect to see more evaluation and acceptance of such products from the IT decision makers who make large-scale decisions about adoption and use of software in corporate settings. I've been involved in the development of Business Readiness Ratings (http://openbrr.org) as a framework to aid such evaluations.
Open source has become a disruptive force in the software industry. Traditional vendors, including IBM, BEA, Borland, and Oracle, have all made acquisitions of open source software, perhaps in reaction to the inroads being made by MySQL, PostgreSQL, JBoss, and Hibernate in their customer base.
Startups including SpikeSource and SourceLabs are offering certified stacks of open source software as a way to minimize the effort of dealing with the release cycles of open source software. Other companies, such as Blackduck and Palamida, are addressing legal issues in the source code of open source components.
The leading US analyst firms - Gartner, IDC, and Forrester - have all been developing their open source expertise for their Fortune 500 and other large clients.
In my book, 2005 was the big year for open source evaluation, and 2006 will be the year in which open source infrastructure software and applications obtain "official" IT support in large corporations, leading traditional software vendors to alter their business models to accommodate the new reality.
2. Graham Hart
When OSS works, we use it - can't think of a reason for not doing. When it does not come up to what we want we wait, but keep an eye on it. Each year sees more OSS come into the 'used regularly' catagory. I don't see what the fuss is about. We are just very grateful to the guys who have the ability to make it all possible. Whilst there is nothing wrong with propriety software; the concept that if the machine dies, so does the software, is repugnant.
3. Hans Bezemer
I remain baffled how little most columnists understand of OSS. They address the OSS community like it is a company - which it is fundamentally not! There is no enterprise wide policy, no shareholders, no CEO. It is what it is: a community.
This community exists of developers, translators, artists and users. Individual users that is. Just like there are individual developers.
These developers started out as individuals that had an itch they wanted to scratch. Other developers followed and - hey: we had a project. These developers of these individual project do listen, but only to their users. Usually on a personal basis. They don't know how to listen to corporations that vice versa don't have a clue how to communicate with those developers.
In a recent article on my blog (http://thebeez.vnunetblogs.com/the_beez_speaks/2005/12/every_dictator_.html)
I addressed some of these issues. OSS is much more emotional and personal than closed source development. Until corporations understand how to communicate with these people, they won't get what they want. A firm understanding of how OSS is developed and why is neccesary on a corporate level.
Corporations could e.g. work together by participating - not just being on the receiving end. There is a lot of development going on in corporations that rots on their selves - what a shame!
In short: if corporations want to get what they want, they have to become part of this culture. Like MySQL, IBM, etc.
And that OSSers like Linux (simply because it is the OS of their choice, like me), forget it - that isn't an issue at all if you don't forget how personal and emotional OSS is - part of the culture. Most OSS projects have Windows versions.
Columns like yours show one more time how little you people understand of OSS and how vital it is you SHOULD understand.