Open-and-Shut Case

Ultimately, the LEF report, as you would expect, comes in positively.

"Open source solutions are safe to use despite the SCO [software infringement] case. For industry and government organizations seeking to reduce ongoing IT costs or looking for new applications with richer functionality, the opportunities with open source are virtually limitless. All potential open source customers must understand the open source software and licences they intend to use, particularly when undertaking development in-house. They can also rely on their trusted service provider to ensure compliance - that is, leave it to the experts."

Koff believes it is this bank of experts - the third parties like Red Hat - that will become important to avoid the hit-and-miss development scenario that so many fear.

"They're primarily doing a little bit of enhancement. Their expertise is smoothing out the edges, adding value around it, but mainly it's maintenance, patch fixing, those kind of management things that the community can't deal with because they'll get a service request and it will just sit there for months, which is what [David Jones from OFBiz] is worried about. I guarantee you Red Hat won't have a service request sitting there for months, because that's their business - otherwise they'd go out of business," Koff says.

The one fear he does admit to is the potential for infinite differentiation if users get carried away with rewriting code. "You might say that this was part of open source, but we would not say that was best practice," says Koff. "It would be very bad, in my opinion, for the standard corporate world to start getting back into the systems software business. A little bit of engineering just to stay on top with this community, that's fine, but to start rewriting the equivalent of CICS . . . we used to do this, but that was bad practice."

The report admits that "CSC is committed to the open source movement", and the myriad examples used throughout the report of successful implementations of open source in various CSC client projects adds testimony to its support, if not its passion.

Koff agrees that, considering this espoused commitment, open source is a potential market differentiator for CSC in the consulting industry. "This is a big company. We are kind of a reflection of the industry; we have active relationships with all the major technology vendors in the world. Our client base reflects the market position of those vendors. OS is an important thing that's happening."

However, he insists that CSC and the LEF "would not be an evangelist about any particular technology, or technology movement, except we are an evangelist for technology".

But no matter how you couch it, many of the statements in the report read suspiciously like an evangelist's position, if not a zealot's. "Commodity computing platforms bring significant price-performance benefits to more and more organizations, defying proprietary approaches", "open source needs to be on the business radar screen", "open source is the ultimate global reuse library" and "if developers aren't using open source software tools they are at a competitive disadvantage" (the last two quoting LEF director, Paul Gustafson).

The authors position open source as a socio-political movement, which is "tapping a worldwide development community that knows no corporate boundaries", "defying the big hand of the corporation", and "from cooking to crops to cholera treatment, open source is sparking innovation in numerous domains. With this comes an ideology of openness: providing global access, enhancing knowledge and solving problems for the greater good."

In fact, in one statement, the report equates the sociological and political impact of open source with the invention of the printing press: "Open source places the scarce resource of software into everybody's hands, the way the Gutenberg press placed the scarce resource of texts into everybody's hands", and elsewhere they suggest the open source community has a motivation similar to that of the Red Cross and the US Peace Corps.

As a comprehensive study of the operations and the potential of open source within the business environment, CSC's "Open for Business" report is impressive. But as a dispassionate and non-partisan look at the business dangers of reliance on that philosophy and the potential pitfalls, it is too often superficial and dismissive, unless of course you believe that there are no dangers or pitfalls and open source really is the best thing since sliced bread.

Gushing as it is with praise of the global impact of open source, more discussion should have been centred on why particular organizations do not take up open source rather than suggesting they would be fools not to.