Gartner: 85 percent of enterprises using open source

Admit it. When you read that headline - "Gartner: 85 percent of enterprises using open source" - you assumed that was a good thing, right? Who's afraid of enterprises saving a lot of money and getting much more flexible IT for their IT budgets?

Gartner, apparently. According to Gartner, that widespread adoption is cause for alarm, as Glyn Moody rightly notes (and pillories). Somehow, Gartner assumes that if 85 percent are using open source and 69 percent don't have a formal open-source management team, the world is going to end.

As Moody notes, however, IT organizations have virtually nothing to worry about when adopting open source:

"About a dozen times a year," [Software Freedom Law Center general counsel Eben] Moglen says, "somebody does something [that] violates the GPL. Most of the time, they're doing so inadvertently, they haven't thought through what the requirements are. And I call them up and I say, 'Look, you're violating the GPL. What you need to do is this. Would you help us?'" The answer is invariably yes, he says.

So the reality of the situation is that the worst you are likely to get is quick phone call from Moglen....Here's the truth, then: there are no "huge potential liabilities" involved with free software. It's very hard to infringe, and very easy to sort things out.

I think it's more likely that Gartner's biggest concern is that open-source software firms (and communities) pay it little money for its research. The biggest danger from open source may actually be to Gartner's P&L statement, not to the enterprises that adopt open-source software.

After all, as IT Pro reports, the Gartner study also indicates that open-source software "is being used for mission critical processes as often as it is for less business-necessary functions." In other words, more of the world relies on software that brings Gartner roughly $0.00 in analyst fees.

I spent last week meeting with customers, including a visit to a Fortune 100 company to advise its legal and procurement teams on open-source software. We talked about its policies for adopting open-source software, as well as contributing to open-source projects. We struggled to find reasons for it to be worried about its increasing adoption of open-source software, but largely failed.

No, I'm not suggesting that enterprises should adopt open source without formal policies, just as I don't think they should be adopting proprietary software without formal policies. But let's not exaggerate the 'risk' of open-source software: it is no more worrisome (and usually much less so) than proprietary software. Gartner analysts are smart and know this. I'm not sure why they continue to accentuate the negative in open-source adoption, other than the fact that most of the firm's revenue comes from proprietary-software vendors who have much to lose from open-source software adoption.

[opnsrcguy]

Matt,

As another guy who represents an open source company, I would only take exception to one point you have in this article, "free". Freeware is free software, where most people first think of open source being free as well. The fact of the matter is that to be open source, you simply have to have your source code available to the general public. If Alfresco was truly "free", I think we can assume you wouldn't have a job right now. :) Many CMS solutions have had to reduce pricing and/or offer more functionality for the price because of what your company has done in its space.

I do thing that cost is a significant reason to go open source, but that is because generally most functionality and much of the innovations in markets come from open source. Open source has done what no other faction of software has done, commoditized the software market as ROI and lower TCO is finally achieveable. What we see from our customers is that we are offering the functionality they need at a value that have never realized with other products or internal code. We are in a soft market economy right now, which means that companies are expected to deliver more with less. Any vendor that can offer that today will see a significant increase in adoption of their technology.

Maybe companies test the software because it is "free", but they adopt and form relationships with OSS companies because it fits their needs and gives them the relationships that the big boys can never match.

[jkunz001]

Matt,

The enterprise's lack of formal policies around the adoption of open source software highlights one of the biggest misconceptions around it. The real "risk" to most "end-users" of open source is not legal in nature but rather operational. For "distributors or vendors" the legal risks are higher. Never the less, the operational risks associated with the adoption of open source are a product of the very attributes of OSS that have the potential to yield the greatest benefits. Enterprises need to create strategy, policy, and process around their use of open source to maximize the operational efficiencies (RIO, TCO, client satisifaction, and employee morale) while minimizing the operational risks (code silos, patch and security management, code reuse, internal support, external support). Open source software adoption is accelerating as the enterprise begins to appreciate and realize benefits such as: lower cost-of?ownership; quicker time-to-market; shorter development cycles; reduced vendor lock-in; a vast array of support options; higher code quality; increased code reuse. It all starts with a strategy, policy, and process built around core business drivers.

Jeff Kunz
Olliance Group
The leader in open source business and strategy planning and implementation

[ydemontcheuil]

Matt,

After Talend was scrupulously ignored by Gartner for their latest Magic Quadrant on Data Integration, I wrote this post: http://www.talend.com/blog/2008/10/29/a-comment-on-gartners-latest-magic-quadrant-for-data-integration/trackback/

Beyond the arguments made here about open source vendors not paying Gartner fees, I think the following point also needs to be taken into account. More than a state of the market, the Magic Quadrant reflects past adoption of certain technologies by large accounts in the US, who are customers of Gartner. Updated every 18 to 24 months and reflecting the long cycles of traditional vendors, who used to take years before their could achieve a significant position on a market, this Magic Quadrant is no longer compatible with new development and adoption cycles such as the ones we can find in open source and SaaS.

Gartner is somewhat of a dinosaur. It will need to mutate, or become extinct. It will take time, but it's not only the strongest who survive... agility is required too.

Yves de Montcheuil
Talend