Thinking about open source

elliot — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 09:08:13 -0600

A few things have prompted me to think about how open source is gradually being recognised as "enterprise-ready":

Articles in IT Week and Computer Weekly give a nice summary of the OSDL's survey of why companies deploy Linux desktops. Surprisingly, the respondent companies' top reasons for going with Linux on the desktop were due to pressure from employees, and due to successful roll-outs by competitors. In one of my talks, intended for IT SMEs, I use one of these arguments to try to persuade SMEs to go with open source: "Look, here are some successful companies like you who are already using open source; why aren't you?". It seems odd that this is a better reason for doing something than for other business reasons, like cost, stability, security, removal of vendor lock-in, etc.. But there you go: it seems to work for the companies I deal with, as well as enterprise types looking to do Linux roll-outs.

Computer Weekly runs a series each week called "Hot Skills", where they highlight skills IT professionals should learn to make themselves employable. What's interesting is that for the past half dozen episodes, the technologies have been open source: PHP, Python, Linux, LAMPP, PostgreSQL. Contrast this with the bulk of the paper, where open source is frequently completely absent, and there is a gross emphasis on monolithic dinosaur companies and their god-awful, horrifically expensive, locked-in, old-fashioned software.

My article "Why you should care about open source" is now available online as part of the British Computer Society's Annual Review 2006. Looking at the rest of the articles, there are a good number about open source; compare this with last year's review, where none of the articles had "open source" in the title.

So open source is (slowly) gaining more acceptance in the mainstream (enterprise). My feeling is that it's not so much acceptance as recognition: I reckon most decent/big companies use open source somewhere, whether they know it or not, and this wave of interest is simply highlighting the fact that executives have realised this and are formalising casual use. Open source was there all along: big companies are only just now admitting it.

townx - Thinking about open source - Comments

Thinking about open source