SIDEBAR: Open Minded

The culture and philosophy

The open for business report from CSC's Leading Edge Forum (LEF), in some instances, reads as much as a socio-political tract as it does a document on an IT development.

Perhaps rightly so, as the open source movement relies heavily on a global community of volunteers devoted to open principles of software development, with fundamental licensing arrangements such as the General Public Licence (GPL), the Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI) that insist on the freedom to share and adapt code.

"The heart and soul of the open source movement is community," the report says, that shares and feeds off expertise "in a loosely-structured meritocracy. The culture is about participation, not profits." This community, according to open source software development site Sourceforge, is made up of almost 865,000 registered users working on more than 82,000 projects.

Controlling this collaborative army of enthusiasts (some have called them zealots) "is not a renegade process but a well-managed one", the report says, adding that the average age of developers using Sourceforge, according to Boston Consulting Group, is 30 years, with 11 years of programming experience.

Bill Koff, vice president of LEF, says that support for open source in the public sector is very much philosophically based. "Governments in general like to be independent of the commercial world, so even in the proprietary [software] world they would always put something up for an RFP process so none of their internal evangelists could cut and choose [specific products] based on their beliefs."

In the private sector, he says, at the developer level, "it's very much evangelical philosophical reasons" why they want to use open source. "I think that's less true of CIOs and technology executives. Some may have strong philosophical opinions, but most discussions centre around 'what am I going to save in cost?'. To them, it's more what the business value is, and nowadays that's more about cost than anything else."

It has been suggested that some of the support for open source is driven by a concern about Microsoft's dominance in the desktop and elsewhere, and certainly Microsoft has been at the forefront of the anti-open source argument. Koff, however, is quick to point out that you should not discount anger at Sun Microsystems. "In the Unix world, Sun has been the one with the proprietary system," he says.

Koff also points out that open source should not be equated solely with Linux. "Linux is getting all the attention, but there are many operating systems . . .

"It's really been IBM that has been pushing Linux, spending hundreds of millions on Linux, and that's all they talk about in open source, so you need to watch that. Up until that point [IBM's advocacy role], most of what was happening with Linux had been consolidation around Unix. IBM to me is clearly targeting Microsoft much more than [it is targeting] Sun."

Despite the emphasis throughout the report on the open source community, how it operates, its motivation and effectiveness, the report briefly adds that "customers will not be interested in altruistic notions of free or open software; customers just care that the software works".

Too true, but the community itself is one of the very reasons why non-users are fearful of taking up open source solutions.

SIDEBAR: Ups and Downs of Open Source

Corporate users, pleased with the capabilities of Linux, are taking a closer look at open source software such as databases and application servers. Some things to consider when moving up the open source stack:

Pros:

• Cost. As far as software acquisition costs go, open source products are free.

• Flexibility. Just like Linux, open source software frees companies from vendor lock-in.

• Close to the code. With open source, enterprise users can pinpoint problems in specific code and suggest patches to solve problems.

• Growing support. Vendors such as HP, Red Hat and Novell are enhancing support for open source products beyond Linux.

Cons:

• Cost. While acquisition costs are free, corporate users must pay for support and services, and there are often costs associated with training IT staff.

• Integration. Today, users are on their own when it comes to integrating open source products into legacy infrastructure, although this is starting to change with companies as varied as Gluecode and HP rolling out support for open source stacks.

• Capabilities. Today's open source databases and application servers are technically very good, but still not up to par with heavy-duty commercial offerings such as DB2 or WebLogic.

• Intellectual property. The SCO Group's legal assault against Linux should serve as a warning shot for any company considering open source. Understand the open source licence governing the product and what your rights and responsibilities are.