Open source delivers significant cost savings, and the market is taking notice: IDC has significantly revised upwards its estimates of global revenue from open-source software. IDC now expects worldwide open-source revenue to grow at a 22.4 percent compound annual growth rate to top $8.1 billion by 2013.
That's a lot of money for free stuff.
The reasons, as I wrote on Wednesday, are clear: open source delivers increased flexibility, improved performance, vendor independence, and, yes, cost savings. According to Computerworld UK, London Paper reports saving 66 percent by using an open-source CMS (Drupal). The Gap, meanwhile, dumped Windows for Red Hat offerings to save money and improve platform flexibility.
Open source: it's what the smart CIOs are using.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Sigurd Magnusson, co-founder of open-source Web content management company SilverStripe, recorded the "Beyond the Hype: The True Costs of Open Source" session at OSCON last week, which he has graciously shared here:
So, yes, you could waste your IT budget on expensive, "sustaining innovations" from old-school vendors. Or you could buy best-of-breed open-source solutions at 10 percent of the cost.
It's your money, after all. Well, unless you give it all to your vendor.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Talk to any open-source vendor (myself included), and we'll tell you that there's a lot of money to be saved by dropping your proprietary software in favor of open-source alternatives. But is that always the case? And, if so, what are the necessary preconditions for saving money?
I chaired a panel at OSCON 2009 where we explored this topic, with some interesting results.
Jeffrey Hammond, a senior analyst with Forrester, provided the underlying data, but Matt Deuel (Virgin Mobile) and Barry Klawans (San Francisco International Airport, IT&T Department) offered real-world experience deploying open-source software, while Zack Urlocker (MySQL/Sun/Oracle) highlighted the balance open-source vendors must strike when working with customers and communities.
Hammond noted that in the rush to save money, CIOs are increasingly turning to open source, though often "open source" isn't the end goal, per se, but rather it's a natural road to vendor independence, IT flexibility, and other goals.
Hence, while we see increased interest in open source, that interest doesn't adequately measure just how pervasive open source has become:
(Credit:
Forrester Research)
Even so, Virgin Mobile's Deuel and SFO's Klawans both reported savings of 80 percent or better with open-source solutions, this despite ongoing maintenance/subscription costs, higher salaries for qualified developers/architects, etc.
In fact, a full 87 percent of companies surveyed by Forrester in a 2008 report indicated that they reduced costs using open source.
Why? Or, perhaps more appropriately, where?
Yes, there is the obvious fact that open-source software comes with a $0.00 license charge, which cost savings can be significant.
But while Microsoft and Oracle duke it out over price increases on licensing, there are far better ways to save money than just reducing license fees, according to the panel.
One way, as Urlocker points out on his blog, is that open source allows enterprise IT projects to succeed or fail with little risk. You know before you pay anything--if you pay anything--that open-source software is going to work, or not.
Klawans suggested that particularly in this economy, he has more people than budget, which makes investing in open source a great idea, because he can use those people to trial and deploy open source rather than consume demos and slideware from vendors.
But there's a much deeper point, and it's something that is often overlooked:
Open source tends to offer best-of-breed solutions that aim to do a limited range of functions well, rather than to be all things to all people.
Indeed, it is this desire to get the core right that enables open source to be all things to all people, because enterprise IT can take an open-source solution that might be 85 percent of what it needs, and spend some time and consulting dollars to custom-fit the software.
Hence, customers can spend less money to get exactly what they want, rather than buying into a vendor's bloatware, which is bloated precisely to justify the upfront license fees ("Look at all this stuff we're selling you!") and ongoing maintenance fees ("Even more stuff we're selling you!").
And because buyers are not locked into a vendor at the code level--though there is always a certain amount of lock-in that derives from committing to a particular software choice, be it open source or proprietary--enterprise IT buyers remain more agile, able to proactively save money rather than slavishly paying into a vendor's most profitable (and arguably least valuable to the customer) maintenance revenue stream.
In summary, yes, open source can save your company money. Lots of money. But often those cost savings materialize in unexpected areas, rather than simply by saving on license fees.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
If you're an open-source developer, OSCON is the closest you'll come to Mecca, whatever your religious persuasion. But OSCON has been branching out in the past few years, and this year, for the first time, it includes a a one-day, free seminar focusing on significant legal issues, called "Understanding Legal Issues in Open Source."
The seminar isn't part of the official OSCON proceedings, but is free and open to all, and is right next door at the San Jose Marriott (room Willow Glen 1)on Wednesday, July 22, and is being organized by OSCON chair Allison Randal along with Mark Radcliffe of DLA Piper and the Open Source Initiative.
The sessions include pertinent topics like "Understanding Venture Capital Investments in Open Source Projects," "Choosing a License: Ensuring that Your Intellectual Property Strategy Matches Your Goals," "Basic Legal Issues for Open Source Projects," and "Demystifying GPL Enforcement: Using the Law To Uphold Copyleft."
Speakers include Vicky Lee, DLA Piper; Josh Stein, Draper Fisher & Jurvetson; Mark Gorenberg, Hummer Winblad; Vivek Mehra, August Capital; Larry Rosen, Rosenlaw & Einschlag; Bradley Kuhn, President, Software Freedom Conservancy; Aaron Williamson, Software Freedom Law Center; and Larry Augustin, CEO, SugarCRM.
In my experience negotiating contracts to license open-source software, it's clear to me that more education like this is needed for developers, lawyers, business executives, and others in the wider open-source community. If you're anywhere near San Jose on Wednesday, you really should consider attending this one-day legal seminar.
It used to be taken for granted that the web was and always would be open. That assumption has increasingly come under fire as cloud computing has set up walled gardens for data and services...much as the desktop has done.
Tim O'Reilly addressed the threat of closed clouds and closed mobile devices to access the web in his keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.
Tim seemed to have lost interest in open source over the past few years, his interest instead turning to Web 2.0 (though he continued to recognize the need for an upgrade to the way we think of open source in terms of licenses instead of services). But somehow, somewhere, Tim re-discovered the importance of open source, this time in keeping Web 2.0 from turning into Manacle 2.0.
I'm not sure that you ever truly left, Tim, but this call to arms is timely and welcome. In his keynote, Tim said:
... Read moreThe VAR Guy was on location at the annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Despite it being an open-source conference for developers, the event was awash in a sea of (highly proprietary) Macs.
...Apple Corporate is nowhere to be seen at OSCON. Steve Jobs must be locked away, designing the next proprietary software platform tied to proprietary hardware and proprietary online Apple services. And yes, The VAR Guy will buy it.
Still, Apple is EVERYWHERE here at OSCON. The VAR Guy estimates that 20 percent to 35 percent of the crowd is carrying MacBooks or MacBook Pros....So here we are, at a big event where Microsoft is spending big marketing dollars - and Apple won the hearts and minds of attendees before they even arrived at OSCON.
I've written on this before, but I'm increasingly of the mind that open-source developers appreciate the excellence of Apple's products, and like the Mac's quick access to the command line and the increasing array of open-source applications that run on the Mac (like Adium, Handbrake, etc.).
Perhaps open-source developers care as much about usability as anyone else.
Due to demands at work, I wasn't able to attend OSCON (Open Source Convention) this year. I was particularly wanting to attend Microsoft's Participate08 day. I like to see what Bill Hilf, Sam Ramji, Robert Duffner, and others there are working on, to get a sense of any outbreaks of rage against the Microsoft machine.
My friend and blogging peer Zack Urlocker attended Monday and, based on his comments, I worry that I didn't miss much. I say "worry" because I expect and we need more from Microsoft than this:
While there were some good comments here or there from the audience, overall, it felt a bit like a committee examining open source from the outside looking in. We spent two hours talking about various themes and models and sociological implications but when the moderator asked the panelists to comment on what they learned, there wasn't much to say. It felt like an academic discussion to me.
This could be because the primary currency of open source is code. Microsoft has done a decent job of opening up to open-source code with Codeplex, but it has yet to engage with open source at the code level from a corporate standpoint.
... Read more
Eben Moglen (left) tells it like it is.
(Credit: James Duncan Davidson)Once upon a time, the term "open source" was coined to save the free-software world from itself--or, rather, from the free-software zealots, as you can read on the Open Source Initiative's Web site.
Today, I can't help but feel that the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, where we're so self-satisfied with the money we're making off open source that we have neglected the essential freedoms that make open-source profit possible.
The wake-up call about the necessary freedoms came from Eben Moglen at last week's O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Some, including software consultant Stephen Walli, don't like the way Eben said it. I wasn't in the room to hear Eben. At any rate, I'm not one for handwringing and am just glad it was said.
Why?
... Read moreI've been attending the O'Reilly Open Source Conference for years and have watched an interesting thing happen. 
A rising number of attendees have come with Mac OS X-based laptops. In fact, throughout the tech world, you see a dramatic increase in the number of people toting Macs. Why?
The Mac, after all, is a closed platform, just as Windows is. In fact, arguably, Apple is a more proprietary company than Microsoft has ever thought of being, controlling hardware and software alike. Just look at how Apple has managed its iPhone product: developers were initially shunned, and then they were allowed to crawl onto the device through the browser (and not a community-based browser like Firefox, but rather through its own Safari).
As a die-hard Mac addict and open-source advocate myself, I was thinking this morning about why the two increasingly converge, despite all the ironies and conflicting approaches. Here's my best guess.
... Read moreSomehow I missed this surprising move by Fontango's COO during OSCON. He quit. The keynote was going swimmingly, and then Simon Wardley (then COO) quit. I really wish I would have seen that.
Why?
... Read more- prev
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