Freeing up the future: Is open source best for business?

We spend $1 trillion on software every year, writing off around twenty percent in failed applications. Not only is open source software free, but many are now claiming it works better too. Exec finds out more.

There’s been a war of attrition going on for a few years now. On one side, there’s the old guard of proprietary software; heavyweights like Microsoft Windows, Adobe Photoshop and Mac OS X, providers of industry standard, premium products - at a premium price. On the other, there’s the young buck in the form of open source software, or OSS.

This upstart may need a little more introduction. Perhaps best described as publicly shared intellectual property, OSS is software for which the underlying code has been made available for users, who are then able to read it or change it as they wish. It’s very much bottom-up system, with an almost hippyish agenda in some quarters of bringing an end to the strangle-grip that software vendors have on the industry.

Typically for something tarred with the hippy brush, the latter has been branded unreliable and of questionable security. Yet, instead, some of the big-hitters of the technology world have been keen to sing its praises.

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Survey: Open source is entering the enterprise mainstream

The survey, collecting data from 328 respondents, showed that more than half the respondents (53 per cent) are using open-source applications in their organization.

Open-source solutions used to be adopted quietly by company boffins who snuck in an Apache Web server or an open-source development tool suite under the philosophy "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission" (not to mention "It's easier to do it with open-source tools than to get an IT budget").

That's no longer the case, according to a survey of IT and business executives and managers, conducted in late April 2008 by CIO.com. The survey, collecting data from 328 respondents, showed that more than half the respondents (53 percent) are using open-source applications in their organization today, and an additional 10 percent plan to do so in the next year. For nearly half, 44 percent, open-source applications are considered equally with proprietary solutions during the acquisition process.

Among those currently employing open-source solutions, the primary uses are operating systems such as Linux (78 percent), infrastructure applications, such as back-end databases and Web servers (74 percent), and software development tools like Eclipse (61 percent).

Those may sound fairly geeky, but business application use isn't far behind. Nearly half of the survey respondents, 45 percent, are using desktop applications such as OpenOffice.org, and 29 percent use open-source enterprise applications. The most popular of those enterprise applications are collaboration tools, customer relationship management (CRM) tools and ERP applications.

Moreover, open-source solutions are generating confidence. Close to three in five respondents, 58 percent, strongly agree or agree with the statement that Linux is reliable enough to depend upon for mission-critical applications. Remarkably, that confidence is highest among IT executives and managers: 62 percent say Linux is ready for prime time.

Respondents to the survey ranged from IT executive or manager (59 percent) and business executive or manager (13 percent) to IT professionals (20 percent) and business professionals (8 percent).

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Taking a risk on open source

Sit back and let me tell you a story about a game-changing open source e-commerce project, an emerging web development firm in Bloomington, and how folks there discovered this project and I, in turn, discovered them.

(Open source is a model that provides access to a product's underlying technology and any specialized knowledge it took to create it. In the case of open source software, the underlying computer code --called "source code" -- is made available under some form of copyright license that adheres to the Open Source Definition.)

What I learned is illustrative of how Internet and web connections are changing everything from value discovery to customer satisfaction — and to how awareness of an emerging company can happen if they're in-the-game and leveraging new social media tools.

Last year, I was performing some due diligence for a client on e-commerce software. Stunned by how poorly executed most open source e-commerce projects were, I was delighted when happenstance brought me to this blog with a link to an open source e-commerce package called MagentoCommerce. After 30 minutes on the site, scanning posts in the forum and looking at the demos, I realized that the sheer scope of the energy, effort and enthusiasm the community was exhibiting around this open source project was going to raise the bar quite high for any other e-commerce offering ... whether commercial or open source.

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