Stretching 2009 Budgets Using Open Source

Hybrid software development is producing results

With a global recession looming, software development managers are being asked to slash resource budgets in 2009 while maintaining schedules. When you need to deliver more features with fewer coding resources, there is only one answer: hybrid development. Hybrid software development involves the combination of internally developed code with external code from vendors, partners, and, especially, the open source community.

Stretching the Budget, Improving Productivity
In this new era of software development, companies will need to rely on development processes and procedures that institutionalize best practices around the integration of internal and external code. This core competency will become one of the ways that world-class software development teams attain competitive advantage. Excellence in managing hybrid development will flow straight to the bottom line, enabling development teams to deliver new applications and features with fewer resources.

It is hard to imagine that anyone would start a project in 2009 and plan to write it entirely from scratch. There are freely available open source databases, kernels, stacks, report generators, XML parsers, utilities, tools, platforms, and more. The list of available open source components, methods, classes, and algorithms is simply too numerous to mention. One customer that I recently spoke to reused open source components in 35% of a $3M software development project. This both reduced schedule risk and produced significant savings for that organization.

Managing Risk
The strategic reuse of open source software brings tremendous potential benefits, but also creates new risks and issues that must be managed: security vulnerabilities, conflicting license obligations, version control issues, code leakage, export regulations, and policy issues. These issues are only somewhat unique to the reuse of external software, but are especially challenging to manage for a code base in which there may be relatively less in-house expertise.

The introduction of an external component into a project needs to be managed as an integrated set of business processes involving software developers in partnership with purchasing, IT, security, legal, product management, the technology office, the open source review board, and any other internal groups that have a stake in the policy administration of software. This is important, because engineering can potentially produce functional code that is dysfunctional from a business and compliance perspective.

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What can government do for open source

Sun chairman Scott McNealy, continuing his rising public role, is in Washington banging the drum for open source. Think of it as McNealy 2.0.

He’s not asking what Sun can do for government but what government can do for Sun. A commitment to open source would give Sun hardware a big leg-up on procurement. By the numbers Sun is still a hardware company and McNealy its chief salesman.

What’s interesting to me is that some in the White House already understand the power of open source. Dries Buytaert confirmed 10 days ago that the Recovery.Gov Web site is based on Drupal, the open source CMS. (The illustration is from that site.)

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UK government eyes open source for flexibility, cost savings

The UK is seeking to boost adoption of open source software in government IT in order to save costs. The new procurement policies laid out in a government plan give preference to open source software in some cases and broadly mandates the use of open standards.

In an effort to cut costs and use taxpayer money more efficiently, the government of the UK intends to increase its adoption of open source software. A report issued Wednesday by the Chief Information Officer Council outlines the benefits of using open source in government IT and establishes a roadmap for improving procurement policies so that they are more conducive to open source adoption.

In the report, digital engagement minister Tom Watson says that the collaborative development model and the high potential for code reuse inherent in open source software deliver real value. Since the UK government's initial push for internal open source adoption in 2004, Linux and open source technology have become a critical part of the government's IT infrastructure.

"Open Source has been one of the most significant cultural developments in IT and beyond over the last two decades: it has shown that individuals, working together over the Internet, can create products that rival and sometimes beat those of giant corporations," he wrote in the report. "It has shown how giant corporations themselves, and Governments, can become more innovative, more agile and more cost-effective by building on the fruits of community work; and from its IT base the Open Source movement has given leadership to new thinking about intellectual property rights and the availability of information for reuse by others."

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