Vendors Open Up

For companies not inclined to stray far from the warm comfort of packaged products, there are more open-source options offered by the vendors themselves. Reacting to pressure from existing open-source projects and intrigued at the idea of expanding their developer base dramatically for minimal costs, many large vendors are even releasing some of their own products as open source, offering the software's source code for free and allowing users to make changes as they see fit. Computer Associates, IBM, Novell, even Microsoft (on a tiny scale), have released source code for community use and development. And a number of smaller vendors - including Chalex, Gluecode Software, JBoss, SugarCRM and MySQL - are built on an open-source foundation.

Customers need to look at such pronouncements with a sceptical eye, however, as many vendors may see open source as an easy way to dump old products. And in those cases, the open-source effort benefits no one.

The idea of having "one throat to choke" when something goes wrong, the legal indemnification some vendors provide against lawsuits concerning open source and the simple comfort of not having to vet one more software application can make vendor-released open source appealing. The vendors, meanwhile, tout open source as a means of helping themselves by reducing development costs and getting customers directly involved in the development process, and they even candidly note attempts to jump-start fading products (Computer Associates with the Ingres relational database) or give birth to ideas that might not have been profitable commercial ventures (IBM's Eclipse development environment project).

But the temptation exists to simply euthanize products by handing them to the "community", thus abdicating further support responsibilities. "Sometimes engineers and product managers make assumptions," says Jeff Hawkins, vice president of the Linux Business Office at Novell. "A common one is: 'Gee, I don't have the resources on this, so let's make it open source.', or 'We don't really care about this any more, so let's release it to open source.'" But, Hawkins says, this almost guarantees open-source failure.

"[You] have to examine [vendors'] motivations," DrKW's Howe agrees. "I think a lot of people are effectively end-of-lifing products in an open-source way. That doesn't work because you end up with a lot of dead software out there that no one's updating."

That very concern struck Shaf Rahman, group technical director at International Customer Loyalty Programmes (ICLP), which puts together loyalty marketing programs for companies, after he heard that Computer Associates was going to release its Ingres database - on which many of ICLP's core systems are built - to open source. "I think in the back of my mind there was that thought that: 'They've absolved all their responsibilities and given it to the people.'" But his fears were calmed after he saw the orderly manner in which the company handled the transition, plus the fact that CA was clearly staying in control of the project and carefully vetting any potential contributions to the source code. This provided both indemnification for any potential legal hassles and a well-known source for support services. As a result, Rahman has hopes that Ingres will be revitalized, gaining both new features and, more importantly, new prominence in the marketplace. "In the past, I'd try to recruit people and they'd say: 'Ingres? How do you spell Ingres?'"

Some observers see the trend of vendor-released open source as a sign that certain parts of the software stack - particularly those at the low end that have become ubiquitous (think operating systems and integration tools) - simply have very little commercial value left and thus are better supported by their communities, freeing up R&D resources for high value-add products.

"Things like [Microsoft] Word and Excel have become relatively static," says Ian Campbell, president and CEO of Nucleus Research. "That's why you see Linux on the desktop with the [open-source OpenOffice productivity suite] as a reasonable alternative." And, he says, as time goes on, more products will fall into the "best as open source" category.

Lead or Get Out of the Way

Open-source advocates have their own worries, of course. One concern with open source is the threat of the nuclear lawsuit, the legal case that could declare certain open-source licences unconstitutional (think SCO vs the GNU Public License) or make the burden of intellectual property protection so onerous that software communities are crushed under the weight. But observers argue that legal uncertainties are a fact of life with commercial software as well.

"Is there risk? There's probably some," says Bernard Golden, author of Succeeding with Open Source and founder and CEO of Navica, an open-source consultancy. "But you need to look at all the risks, including the risk of not doing the project."

Simply banning open source probably isn't an option, however. As just one example, software development researcher Evans Data's numbers have shown an almost 200 percent increase in use of MySQL by database developers since 2001 - from 16.4 percent to 48.5 percent. And as large open-source projects such as the Eclipse development environment gain steam, the temptation to download and use the tools - rather than wait weeks for a purchase order to clear accounting - will do nothing but increase.

But like anything in IT, the best way to approach open source is with a plan, with scepticism and with the understanding that you're going to need to roll up your sleeves.

"The more you put into something, the more you get out of it," says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "Open source is no different."