iQ Special Report: Open Source - An Open and Shut Case?

With market conditions continuing to evolve and develop in its favour, will it be be plain sailing for open source from here on in, or could there yet be troubled waters ahead?

According to Bram Smeets, enterprise Java architect with open standards software services company, JTeam - any number of factors are driving the commercial uptake of open source, but three more than others.

The first, he says, is the massive 'professionalisation' of open source taking place right across the market. Businesses, having largely conquered the fear of the unknown that open source used to represent, are deploying it in a broader variety of settings than ever before, he says, and undertaking software development under their own steam rather than simply buying off the shelf as they used to.

“Open source isn’t just about delivering cheaper IT. It’s about delivering better IT.”

The second is that Line of Business (LoB) applications are set to be a massive growth area for open source. With many financial institutions already using open standards to develop LoB apps, this should not only cement open source's place in the strategic arena, but give it a higher profile among users too.

Third and most important though, is the fundamental realisation among organisations that open source "not only affords a real alternative to closed source products, but a greater level of control and, in many cases, a better solution. Better software."

Driven by this building momentum, a new breed of software player now sits at the intersection in between the open source and proprietary worlds - the commercial open source business - and it looks to be in a position of real strength.



But Gartner VP Robert DeSisto concedes that while such companies look certain to embrace open source to an ever greater extent, there's no reason to think they'll immediately cut their prices just because their costs have fallen. Instead, he says, with the success of their platforms "highly dependent on the success of the community" they're likely do whatever they have to in order to support that ecosystem.

Cost is obviously another key element says Matt Asay, VP of Business Development with Alfresco Software. For while the code itself might be free, development, maintenance and support most certainly aren't. "Open source sells itself on price quite often", says Asay, "but its long-range future depends on selling an entirely different value
proposition: value and innovation."

"It's often the IT budget rather than the longer range IT strategy which provides an entry point for free software in the enterprise. And the distinction is crucial. It is arguable that the real business advantage... can only be realised through the adoption of the culture surrounding free software. For most enterprises, this is a long range proposition."

To deploy open source solely on the basis of immediate cost reductions, says Asay, is to sell yourself short and miss the point. Current economic conditions could drive a wave of open source adoptions, but opinions vary as to
what the extent of this could be.

Gartner estimates that businesses will cut IT budgets by about 10% over the next 12 months. But Alex Cullen, VP and research director at Forrester, believes 2008 will be a period of "digestion" as far as IT expenditure is concerned; a time when FDs will neither increase or cut IT spend to any great degree. Instead businesses will look to "make the most of what they already have".

Not everyone agrees however. Anne Mulcahy, chairman and CEO of Xerox, recently painted a much grimmer picture however. In an interview with the Financial Times she predicted that anxiety over plummeting share prices and the overarching climate of uncertainty will see many businesses minimising IT spend over the next year or so. Either way, with its promise of low up front capital expenditure, conditions could be perfect for widespread open source adoption - a factor which open source protagonists will hope encourages UK businesses out of their inertia.

According to a recent survey, UK organisations are generally slower in adopting open source technologies than their American and European counterparts - a trend that was partly attributed to UK businesses' reluctance to download software online and partly to their preference for forming established, formal relationships with their software vendors.



2006 saw the announcement of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. The brainchild of sometime MIT professor, Nicholas Negroponte, its mission was "to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child".

The project's focal point was the development of a very low-cost, extremely rugged open source (Linux) based laptop; the idea being that, properly designed and sold in large enough quantities, the machine could be built and priced cheaply enough for developing countries to afford to buy one each for their millions of under-privileged children.

Called the XO, the realisation would be a light, fanless, driveless, spillproof, rainproof, dustproof, drop-proof small form factor machine with built-in camera, microphone, memory-card slot, graphics tablet, game-pad controllers, and tablet functionality. All for just $200.

The concept would later be supplemented by the so called "Give 1, Get 1" initiative whereby individuals or business would pay $400 (see www.xogiving.org) to receive one XO (and a nice tax deduction), while a second was sent to a third world student.

Undoubtedly a great idea, the initiative has enjoyed encouragement and support worldwide. Of late however, it has experienced its share of problems - suggesting, for almost the first time, that plain sailing is no more guaranteed on the good ship open source than anywhere else.

Calling the initiative's very ideals into question, a blog post from OLPC's former head of security development, Ivan Krstic, told of an organisation with serious problems. He suggested that OLPC had become less about improving education in developing nations than enabling members of the opensource community to leverage their agenda, and was unequivocal in criticising certain of the project's tactics.

"OLPC should be philosophically pure... Being a non-profit that leverages goodwill from a tremendous number of community volunteers... and whose core mission is one of social betterment, it has a great deal of social responsibility", he lamented. "It should not become a vehicle for creating economic incentives for a particular vendor."

Condemning some of the more extreme pro-open source beliefs held by certain members of the project, the blog's parting shot was equally forthright. "Here's to open learning, to free software, to strength of personal conviction, and to having enough damn humility to remember that the goal is to bring learning to a billion children across the globe. The billion waiting for us to put our idiotic trifles aside, end our endless yapping, and get to it already."