Open-Source Reshaping the Software Industry

Volunteers drive Mozilla’s success; Microsoft concerned

The war for Web browser market share is kicking into high gear.

“People in the industry foresee a time in which for many people, the only thing they'll need on a computer is a browser. The browser is just extraordinarily strategic,” said Mitch Kapor, the software pioneer and a director at the Mozilla Foundation, according to the NewsFactor Network.

A Web browser is a type of software that allows one to view information on the Internet. The most well known browsers are Microsoft Corporation’s Internet Explorer and Apple, Inc.’s Safari.

Mozilla, which holds a 28 percent market share, recently released the newest version of its open source browser, dubbed Firefox 3. Firefox was downloaded more than 8 million times on its first day of release.

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Is Open Source software safe and secure?

It’s a big question: how trustworthy is the software I use on my computer? When it comes to open source, can you trust the quality of programmers who work for free? You can, according to a new report out this week – which also proves major open source offerings to be especially well written. It equally shows up the projects which are slow to respond to vulnerabilities.

One argument for open source has always been that you have inherently more security because anyone can examine the underlying program code and verify it does what it ought to be doing. But then, does this really mean anything for non-programmers? In one sense, you’re still depending on the word of others; open source does remove a major barrier by giving you the program code but that’s only part of the puzzle. You also need both the time and the expertise to analyse it.

Here’s where Coverity come in. They are a commercial code analysis company which began at Stanford University. Coverity have been running a project called Scan for two years with funding provided by the Department of Homeland Security in line with its own objectives to harden open source apps. This week Coverity released their Open Source Report for 2008. This report is interesting stuff; it draws on two years’ worth of data from over 250 significant C/C++ open source projects – like PHP, Perl, Python and Samba, all veritable household names (albeit in a fairly geek household.)

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The open-source industry is worth $60 billion

John Powell, CEO of Alfresco, has declared that the open-source industry is worth $60 billion, not necessarily because of its vendors' collective revenue, but rather because of the value of the cost savings for customers.

That's the right way to think about software: From the customer's perspective.

• Open source is now the world's largest software industry....You measure it in the savings people are making in licence fees....Licence fees don't add any value to the product and are purely a transfer of wealth from consumers to software vendors.

Subscription-based business models are ideal for customers because they focus the vendor on delivering constant, consistent value. License-based businesses? Not so much.

As a case in point, Alfresco (Disclosure: I work for Alfresco) just closed a deal with a large US federal agency. The project is worth over $50 million, with Alfresco at the core. But if all of that $50 million were going into my pocket it would be a success for Alfresco and a failure for the customer. Why?

Because as it stands, most of that money is going to integrators to customize our software (and others' - it involves a few big proprietary vendors, too) to fine-tune it to the agency's needs. Our proprietary competition on the deal started the bidding at $2.5 million, and would have cost multiples of that to get it do what the agency actually needed, as the agency determined.

So, we shaved costs off the project, and allowed the agency to divert funds from license costs to system integrators to ensure a close fit. Perfect.

Open source tends to be less costly because of its $0.00 acquisition cost, but also because it is more easily customized and integrated with other systems, including proprietary ones. Open source, open APIs, open standards. They tend to travel together.

Source : http://www.cnet.com/