A Rosy Future for Open Source
by Reuven Lerner - Mar. 28, 2008Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
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Open-source software is widely acknowledged as being powerful, inexpensive, and secure. Not only that, but we should expect to see more open source in the enterprise over the next few years. So says a survey published during InfoWorld's Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), held earlier this week in San Francisco.
This attitude toward open source represents a dramatic change from the norm just 10 years ago. In my consulting work, I still encounter people who hesitate to use open source, asking who was responsible (and thus could be sued) if the software didn't work. Of course, I haven't heard of too many people successfully suing Microsoft for buggy or insecure software. But this question used to come up all of the time. Now, it would seem, IT managers realize that the term "open source" is not at all synonymous with "bad," "buggy," "insecure," or "insufficient for real business needs."
So, what results did we see from the survey? What does the survey tell members of the open-source community? Furthermore, what does the survey tell managers who are considering an embrace of open source?
To begin with, it seems clear that open-source software will continue to grow in the foreseeable future. More than 80 percent of the respondents said that "the economy's turbulence" is good for open-source software. This doesn't come as much of a surprise; given that open source is typically free of charge, and that companies in uncertain times need to hoard their cash.
Even without a looming recession, open source is a good deal for business. Respondents indicated that they like the low price that open source offers. But open source was attractive for more than its low price: Respondents also indicated that they like to have access to the source code, as well as freedom from being locked into a single vendor. This means that customers do see a difference between "free of charge" and "open source," and are likely to prefer open-source solutions even when they are offered commercial products for little or no cost.
Surprisingly, "superior security" was cited by very few respondents as a reason to prefer open-source software. Security experts have generally said that "security through obscurity," the idea that keeping techniques secret will prevent attacks, is largely wrong, and that the best security mechanisms can be discussed freely. For example, public-key encryption is an extremely secure mechanism, even though it has been publicly documented and discussed for two decades.
We would thus expect that open-source software, which is developed in the public eye, would be more secure, and that IT professionals would be more likely to accept it. Perhaps this is an area in which the open-source community needs to spend more time educating the public, demonstrating that revealing the source code does not necessarily make a system more vulnerable.
Perhaps the most revealing statistic was the answer to the question, "In five years, what percentage of purchased software will be open source?" More than half of the respondents said that this will be true for 25-50 percent of software within five years, and another 15 percent of respondents said that an even greater proportion will be open source. This not only demonstrates the increasing acceptance rate of open source, as well as the IT community's internalization of this trend, but also the acceptance of "paid open source." Whether they mimic Red Hat (pay for updates and service), MySQL (dual license), or EnterpriseDB (create a proprietary superset of the open-source version), open source companies should know that more and more companies are willing to pay for their products and services.
How popular do you think open source will be in the enterprise in the coming years? Is any type of software likely to remain proprietary?
