Have no doubt – open source is here to stay. What is the future for it though and where does it fit best? How much does it compete with proprietary software? The answer might depend on who you speak to. Larry Ellison says MySQL is no threat to Oracle, come on! Why is he buying it up then, maybe not to kill it, but certainly to own it!
Open source software in the early days got lapped up by the independent developer community and technology startups. Large and Medium enterprises were a little slow to adopt it and understandably so. There were apprehensions on stability, support, security and performance; they just felt comfortable and safer with the trusted, tested and tried proprietary model. Over a period of time large enterprises too have embraced open source, most of them took steady steps beginning with infrastructural elements such as Operating System (Linux) followed by Database (MySQL) and several of them went down the LAMP path (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python). The next phase of evolution resulted in several products and application areas such as in Business Intelligence, Portals, Content Management and just about any domain that proprietary products operated in.
The emergence of the LAMP stack, J2EE and several products that were built off of those platforms provided a sense of independence in that integration with proprietary systems (which could be a nightmare) was not essential.
A couple of factors that make Open source a good choice:
Cost – Open source carries a cheaper price tag than proprietary software in most cases. There are free and close to free software but that doesn’t really work out for most enterprise needs. Nothing comes free in this world, if it does, there is a lot of baggage. The commercial model for open source software works in different ways but most of them either offer free software with paid support or a paid enterprise edition vis-à-vis the community edition.
Independence – Customers were earlier tethered to proprietary vendor environments whose products would not talk to each other and subject to dictates of the vendors. Open source offers freedom from vendor lock-in and a great deal of interoperability.
As to the future, open source will continue to co-exist with proprietary software but it is hard to imagine that it would dislodge proprietary software, it will be a choice and an effective alternative in some cases. Communities can thrive but they need commercial Oxygen as well, therefore commercial software can do certain things better ofcourse at a differential cost, but remember though that TCO matters more than direct costs alone.
The Open Source movement is apparent and has gained ground; altruism, common good and the not-for-profit motive are driving factors. The challenge is in its sustainability in some form or the other, so far it has fared very well indeed! It is in the hands of enterprises to have an open mind for open source…. pick the right choices, products, tools, in combination thereof with proprietary technologies and benefit from it.
Tags: LAMP, Open Source
