Can Open Source Help the Economy?

In the last major economic downturn, Linux established itself as a widely-accepted enterprise operating system, benefiting a lively ecosystem of vendors such as Red Hat and Novell. The return of tough economic times puts the open source alternative again front and center, this time with focus on databases and higher-level software applications.

I believe we've entered another era for open-source companies of all stripes. IT decision makers need to fight the financial crisis and they need a more efficient solution for critical enterprise system and IT needs.

As IT costs grow and the economic crisis puts pressure on global IT budgets, open source becomes irresistibly attractive to developers and IT decision makers who are being asked to do more with a whole lot less. Meanwhile, proprietary vendors react by increasing license fees by 15 percent to 45 percent, they continue to lock-in their customers, and they take away independence regarding choice and flexibility across the enterprise technology infrastructure.

That's why open-source solutions are more attractive than ever.

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Why Open Source is hot now?

With the deepening of the credit crisis, melt down in the financial industry, the IT budgets in the big companies is under squeeze.

Companies are looking at optimizing their IT budgets and seriously looking at Return on their investments. The commercial software license costs; be in hardware, operating system, infrastructure, database, commercial applications and consulting & support, is being reviewed and seriously considered for optimizing and cost cutting.

Open source software and solutions have a great opportunity to survive and benefit in this economy as they provide better returns for the companies that are looking to save huge licensing costs and greater availability of solutions and software that can be easily adopted.

Open source software and solutions have matured over years and a bigger community to support them. There are several solutions from multiple vendors for business problems and substantially less expensive compared to commercial software from the proprietary software companies.

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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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Open source software requires governance, Burton warns

Uncontrolled use of software components can affect IT operations as well as development. - Joe Niski Senior Analyst for Application Platform Strategies, Burton Group

Open source software (OSS) frequently flies under the radar in IT organizations, and if governance is not in place to identify it and manage legal licensing implications, it may crash and burn, Burton Group Inc. warns.

Developers working on SOA and other software projects are making use of OSS components, and IT, QA and legal departments are ignoring the licensing ramifications at their peril, according to a new Burton report.

The growing popularity of the Java Development Kit from Sun Microsystems Inc., and the Eclipse IDE are resulting in a proliferation of OSS components in applications that organizations consider proprietary, according to the report's author, Joe Niski, senior analyst for application platform strategies for Burton. Legal problems arise because, while open source licenses are more liberal than traditional vendor licenses, they are still licenses. Terms and conditions that must be observed, the analyst explains in a 27-page report, "Open Source Management: Who Owns That Software?"

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Letter: Misunderstandings over open-source software harm local IT industry

I am writing to appeal to you to correct some serious errors in the manner in which the speech of minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi at the Idlelo conference, as well as subsequent response to it, were covered. I am particularly referring to the opinion piece that was carried in Business Report on March 30, Microsoft's mission to make money in a mouse click.

The minister opened a pan Africa conference on free open source software (FOSS), called Idlelo, held in Dakar last month. Idlelo was started here in South Africa, at the University of the Western Cape in 2004.

Some of the reports about her speech set up the notion of the minister pitted against the IT (information technology) industry. Yet nothing could conceivably be further from the truth.

The opinion piece in Business Report provides a good example of the horrible lack of understanding of the IT industry and the IT landscape in South Africa, and the hazards to South Africa of spreading dangerous misinformation that is itself a threat to our IT industry and the jobs that the industry creates.

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