April 5
Analyst Admits Open Source Will Quietly Take Over
“In a few years’ time, almost all businesses will use open source” says a recent Gartner report entitled, “The State of Open Source 2008.” The report continues with statements such as, “By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms.” (I’m getting my data from ZDNet, as the report, despite reporting on open source software, is not openly available).
It seems that Gartner has realized what so many have realized already: That open source makes sense from a business perspective. The report, however, does miss some key features of “open source.”
The report uses the term “open source” and does not discuss Free Software or use that term (not all open source software is Free Software! This “little” difference can be very important!). For example, the Microsoft open source licenses are “open source” but notably not Free – as a business, being bound by the MS licenses could be a very bad thing, as they severely restriction modification, distribution, and attribution – things which are integral to the use of the software, especially in a business environment.
The reports has no mention of how the sharing of code and ideas benefits corporations beyond merely reducing licensing costs. It misses the whole point of the Free Software culture, that companies such as Red Hat, Drupal, Canonical, and IBM make their money and success on. For example, Red Hat makes money by having the community do a lot of work for it at a lesser cost, something the report misses.
SaaS (Software as a Service) is a major focus of the report, and is something analysts such as Garntner and Forrester spend a lot of time and paper contemplating. The report, however, fails to notice that a large amount of SaaS is actually Free Software. For example, WordPress (which powers this blog) is available in SaaS from (at www.wordpress.com) and the exact same Free Software is downloadable and runnable on your own server (which is what we at Molecular do). So the differentiation that SaaS will become popular versus open source is fundamentally inaccurate – since SaaS can be open source, they are not mutually exclusive.
I’m not surprised that Gartner made these mistakes – Gartner, as I understand it, gets its information via marketing materials, press releases, and other traditional measures, whereas most of the Free Software world disseminates information via meetings, blogs, emails, and newsgroups. Furthermore, analysts make money by charging for content (as exemplified by the lack of available of this particular report) – the same business model that proprietary software uses. So the idea of free information/software is a very different philosophy, one that can be seen as threatening to their own business model, and therefore perhaps not in an analysts’ best interest to study too much.
However, I am pleasantly surprised that these groups, that so many CTOs, marketing departments, and other groups pay very close attention to, are finally looking at open source and seeing its value.
Interestingly, this bit of news came out at the same time as some developments. Just recently, I wrote a blog post about how Red Hat’s CEO indicated that his company is going to increase it’s Free Software advocacy. According to CNET, Linux use is up 61% over the past 12 months – now at 2.01%. Firefox’s use rate is now somewhere around 15%. Apple’s Safari browser was built using a Free Software renderer, and Apple now develops the browser rendering engine, WebKit, as Free Software. Perhaps the corporate world is ready for Free Software? Should Molecular join the movement?
The Analyst Admits Open Source Will Quietly Take Over by Molecular Voices, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Drake Pusey said on April 7th, 2008
Craig Andrews said on April 7th, 2008
The same logic applies to malware. If Molecular were to add malware to OO.o, someone else is going to notice – because it will affect them. They’ll report the issue, and Molecular’s reputation will be severely damaged, and OO.o will fix it very quickly.
If the malware is introduced by OO.o, and they won’t remove it, someone will fork the code, and create say Molecular OO.o (MOO), that removes the feature they don’t like. If other companies/groups like it, they’ll switch to it, and the original OO.o will die. This forking process has happened many times before.
Ryan Mulloy said on April 7th, 2008
eric karofsky said on April 9th, 2008
Chet Geschickter said on April 14th, 2008
1. “Who will be accountable for maintaining the alignment between user needs and product features?”
Response: Open Source is not free, even if it appears to be, especially for corporations relying on it for their business operations. Each company participating in the open source movement is making an economic investment decision when they choose to download and use the software. By doing so, they become reliant on the software. Licensing fees are chump change compared to the costs of implementing and managing an enterprise infrastructure. Over time, companies begin to need new extensions and functionality and, voila, you have another set of developers building and extending to meet those needs. This furthers the open source movement.
2. “Who will bear responsibility to ensure that malware is not built into software that has a widespread corporate user base?”
Response: Significant open source movements have very active communities where issues like security are being dealt with. The level of sophistication is high. Security loopholes are continually identified and addressed. Developers are constantly creating and distributing patches, new versions, etc. in order to address security problems – just like Microsoft and others are doing. Security is a never-ending battle. Anything online is exposed. For instance, I need to add 9 and 3 and type in the answer in order to post this comment.
3. Yes, you might say that user-contribution systems like Wikipedia are self-correcting, but isn’t it a little more risky if business software is at stake?
Response: Actually, I wouldn’t say Wikipedia is self-correcting. Users edit Wikipedia and, over-time, the listings become more detailed and more accurate. Wikipedia is a social system that values honesty and integrity. The number of people abiding by these social norms of participation and their level of activity over-time eclipses the negative or malicious participation. The same holds true in Open Source.
4. “In the olden days, the developers and users of open source were one and the same. As that changes, what balances the system?”
Response: By olden days, I’ll assume you mean a point in time (that varies depending on which project we are referring to), where the ratio of users to developers was low. Theoretically, at the beginning of a project it is nil – for instance, dozens of developers coding and testing, but no users. Over time, as a platform becomes adopted, the number that download and use the platform increases and begins to gradually, then exponentially, exceed the number of active developers. This is inconsequential so long as the number of developers is growing and the pace of new functionality introduction is robust.
What inevitably happens is a cottage industry of fee-based extension developers and paid consultants emerges around open source platforms. This creates a hybrid eco-system where people are using freeware and paid extensions. Important problems are posted on communities and resolved by hired-gun consultants for a fee.
It’s something best understood by participating in. Once you begin to, it all sort of clicks together and makes sense. These are my observations from using Joomla on my own website, which, by the way, was a fork from another open source community/content management system project.
Make sense?