Open Source

CNET's Matt Asay wrote "Open source and the future of vendor-free IT", in which he takes a contrary view to IDC's Matt Lawton (author of the gated ($4,500 gated at that) paper "2007 Industry Adoption of Open Source Software, Part 2: Project Adoption").

The key quote is this one, from the IDC paper:

The shocking result here is the complete dearth of service providers that are currently being tapped for installation, training, and other services associated with open source software, regardless of where in the software stack that software sits. Less than 1% of the projects have attendant services sourced from service providers.

I agree with Matt Asay's assessment that this "shock" is actually representative of an important trend that many have ignored: large organizations and small are finding the installation and maintenance of open source packages to be within the capabilities of their own staff.

A recurring misconception about open source is that it is cost free. Both commercial and open packages have costs beyond acquisition costs; there are training costs, maintenance costs and the costs of upgrades. There are costs in terms of hardware such as servers, network infrastructure and client requirements incurred by using a package. There are soft costs like lost productivity if a resource becomes unavailable

IDC's author is shocked that less than a quarter of open source projects used service providers to handle these tasks internally, calling it a "throwback to the 1970s and 1980s, where internal IT groups handled all the system integration requirements for their software developments".

CNET's Matt Asay on the other hand has a more upbeat interpretation:

"Why is this a bad thing? Enterprises are unshackling themselves from proprietary, expensive licenses and reinvesting that money in the gift that keeps on giving: people. That's how I read the data."

It is this point that I agree with; open source projects are normally applied to low risk areas using mature open source solutions that provide value without all the overhead of commercial licenses and very low ongoing costs. That, in fact, is where open source shines for commercial users. Maintaining an open sourced server using modern package management (i.e., not building from source code, but using APT or RPM packages that install via a system installer that handles dependencies and versioning) is as easy as installing any commercial package, yet costs nothing up front other than the time of an administrator with similar skills to a low level Windows administrator.

Once this installation is done, the costs of periodically updating the software in a test environment and then deploying are very similar between open and closed source packages. I know, because our company has done both paths for nearly a decade now; using various open source and closed source packages side by side and evaluating the cost effectiveness of both approaches periodically. For established problem spaces such as serving web pages, using "read mostly" databases, file serves, backup tools, e-mail, bug tracking, in house content management and similar areas the open source packages have been as reliable as commercial packages and have lower maintenance costs and almost zero acquisition and scaling costs.

We still use commercial desktops and line of business software (financial, task management, status tracking, etc) because the offerings in the open source arena are not yet mature enough to handle our diverse needs... yet. However, I have no doubt that before the end of this decade the ratio of open to closed packages will tip further towards the open side. For some of my clients I have been able to move to pure open source solutions (a Linux desktop distribution with Open Office for basic word processing and spreadsheet needs and Firefox for web browsing; the vast majority of the line of business applications for these clients have been reworked as web based applications, making the operating system irrelevant for most cases). Most companies still have enough legacy software to make a full open source solution impractical, but I have to say that the administration of these clients is a breeze compared to mixed of fully Microsoft shops.

Open source provides a baseline that commercial providers need to exceed to prove their value to me these days. Some providers do so, but I like the fact that the open source option is keeping these commercial providers honest and forcing them to innovate and improve: in many spaces the open option it is the sole viable competitor, and thus regulator of costs.