Given the vast and growing number of open-source projects, one would assume its quality had gone down as quantity went up. In fact, the inverse is true, suggests a new report from Coverity, which spent the past three years analyzing more than 11 billion lines lines of code from 280 open-source projects. This is crucial given open source's increased importance to the software industry as a whole, and not merely self-styled "open-source companies."
Among other findings, Coverity's report reveals a 16-percent reduction in static analysis defect density. While Coverity's analysis doesn't cover all or even most open-source projects, which number in the hundreds of thousands, it does tell us a great deal about the quality of the more successful projects like Linux, Firefox, Samba, and PHP.
Each of these projects is growing, and on average their quality is getting better. That's a feat of which few commercial software products can boast.
Such vendors are, however, taking notice. SAP, for example, despite its billions in sales, is trawling for sales leads on open-source start-up Openbravo's SourceForge.net project page.
SAP and other traditional software vendors aren't stupid. They can see a significant customer shift to subscription-based open-source offerings. Customers are increasingly looking for ways to lower costs and boost productivity through open source, as David Buckholtz, vice president of Enterprise Technology and Quality at Sony Pictures Entertainment, told the LinuxCon crowd Tuesday in a panel I moderated. Buckholtz suggested that what started out as a small experiment to replace BEA WebLogic, became a major shift to using open-source technology all over SPE, both to cut costs and improve product quality.
No, not all open-source software is fantastic, and undoubtedly even some of the commercial open-source software offerings are weak. The best open-source projects, as Intel's Dirk Hohndel pointed out in his LinuxCon keynote, are those with strong execution and vision. Just like in the proprietary software world.
Coverity's analysis, however, suggests that open-source software may have the upper hand on its proprietary peers. Open-source quality is almost certainly a direct result of open-source transparency, something Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst suggested at Red Hat Summit recently when he opined, "If we all had to walk around naked we'd all spend more time in the gym."
An open-source project will only be as good as the developers who work on it, but those developers have a strong motivation to make the code secure, robust, and high performance. The code is "naked," as it were. The source code is open.
Customers and competitors are noticing.
Disclosure: SAP Ventures is an investor in Alfresco, my employer, and I am an adviser to Openbravo.
I recently delivered a presentation at the Openbravo World Conference on the rise of open source and the value and nature of commercial open-source projects within the open-source community. Here are my slides:
As I've noted before, the open-source ecosystem would be much poorer if companies were to stop funding key parts of it. This presentation strived to identify how to build community without lobotomizing the companies involved.
Disclosure: I am an advisor to Openbravo.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
One of the best ways to see how a company is doing is by looking at the caliber of people it attracts. With that in mind, it's impressive to see whom open-source enterprise resource-planning vendor Openbravo just recruited:
Jesper Balser, co-founder and former CEO of Navision, a leading ERP vendor acquired by Microsoft in 2002, is the newest member of its board of directors.
In addition, Openbravo has hired Cees Poortman, another veteran of Navision and Microsoft, as its vice president of global commercial operations.
The VAR Guy suggests that these hires "speak volumes about growing momentum for open-source applications," and he's right. But it's also a particular testament to the quality of Openbravo's team and its own momentum, something I see regularly as an adviser to Openbravo.
Open source has clearly gone mainstream. It is attracting some of the best and brightest from the proprietary-software world, as they see the writing on the wall for incumbents.
Disclosure: I am an adviser to Openbravo.
While open source has made its mark in just about every product segment within enterprise software, ERP (enterprise resource planning) has remained firmly proprietary. As CIO.com's Thomas Wailgum suggests, however, the time may be ripe for change.
The reason? Years of empty promises and overloaded invoices from the incumbent ERP vendors may finally ring hollow in a global recession:
Does a massive, 18-month, multimillion-dollar ERP rollout, with the odds of implementation and user acceptance stacked against you and 22 percent annual maintenance costs to boot, seem appropriate now?
ERP industry guru Vinnie Mirchandani likes to say that there are too many "empty calories" in ERP spend, especially in SAP and Oracle maintenance fees. Now is clearly not the time to be ordering up large portions of highly caloric ERP software rollouts.
Just as the economy is proving to be Google's toughest competitor and the biggest reason to innovate, so, too, may the economy be chief information officers' biggest reason to get out of the "no one ever got fired for spending way too much on bloated ERP" mindset and shift spending to software as a service and open-source ERP.
Openbravo, Compiere, and other open-source solutions have been around for several years, and they are surprisingly robust and feature-rich. 2009, with all its financial challenges, may well be the opportune time for CIOs to kick the tires on these alternative solutions.
Disclosure: I am an advisor to Openbravo, an open-source ERP vendor.
Portland is one of my favorite cities on the planet, and today I learned to love it even more. Portland's transportation agency, TriMet, has been using open-source Openbravo POS since 2007 in its automated system to sell tickets and passes to the public. $4.5 million in transactions later, Openbravo POS continues to deliver.
Why Openbravo?
At the time of the selection, they evaluated Openbravo POS against some the most popular commercial POS solutions and our beloved open source application came out on top. The deciding factors were its simplicity, rich functionality and the quality of its code. The implementation project was very rapid and within a very short period, TriMet had integrated Openbravo with its existing payment service, selected the hardware for the terminals, and was up and running serving its customers.
Every time I've been in Portland I've used TriMet's MAX light rail service, and bought my tickets using this system. I never knew that open source was powering the transaction until today, and even as an advisor to Openbravo, I had never heard of this success story.
I'm guessing that much of what we do is powered by open source, but we don't know it. That Google search you do. That Orbitz service you use. And so on. It's all open source.
The VAR Guy has the scoop on some upcoming Ubuntu news: Ubuntu and Openbravo are teaming up to help push Ubuntu into the enterprise.
Now, Canonical is seeking killer server applications for Ubuntu. MySQL, the open-source database now owned by Sun, has backed Ubuntu quite a bit. And now Openbravo is joining the party...Smart move by Canonical and Openbravo. CIOs, midmarket IT managers, and solutions providers don't care much about server operating systems. It's all about the applications.
I agree, and so do Red Hat and Novell, which built their formidable server businesses by focusing on applications.
It's interesting, however, where Canonical/Ubuntu is focused. It started with some select, big-name partnerships with IBM and others, and is now focused on shoring up that story with open-source applications. Openbravo is the first to leak, but there are others in the works.
... Read moreI stumbled across this news from Openbravo this morning, and thought it indicative of the type of contribution typical to commercial open-source projects. Egyptian accounting for Openbravo's open-source ERP platform. No way that a proprietary software company is going to write that, not until every other aspect of the product is already complete.
For organic open-source communities, bug fixes, code contributions, etc. can be expected, though not to the levels commonly expected. It turns out that all (or nearly all) communities are small, even for projects like Linux and Apache. Some, like Drupal, break this mold, but they are the exception, not the rule.
For most projects, including commercial open-source projects, localization and some bug reporting constitute the primary contributions from the community.
... Read moreOpenbravo, the open-source ERP vendor, has pulled in $12 million in Series B funding from new investors Amadeus Capital, GIMV and Adara Venture Partners.
As an advisor to Openbravo, I can attest to how hard the Openbravo team worked to finalize this funding. It is an investment well-earned, and should be money well-spent.
Openbravo has emerged as perhaps the leading open-source ERP vendor in a short space of time, in large part because of its strength as a hosted solution and due to its viability in emerging markets like Latin America and under-served parts of Europe.
Congratulations to the Openbravo team!
Yesterday I suggested that Google could allay a lot of concerns about what it intends to do with others' applications, data, etc. by firmly committing to open source, open data, and open APIs. Today, albeit on a much smaller scale, open-source ERP provider, Openbravo, did just that with the Openbravo Manifesto.
Here are just two of the commitments Openbravo made:
- Open Source: A functional version of our software is always published under an open source license. Our goal is to enable any person with the required skills to install, configure and use Openbravo ERP and POS in a production environment.
... Read more
I rarely like top-10 lists, because they usually are engineered by PR firms, not real analysis. The VAR Guy, however, has a list that seems fairly well-grounded in reality (though I think he missed some obvious ones like Alfresco and MuleSource, but then I'm biased).
A few things he gets wrong, like that MySQL customers "CraigsList, Google, TicketMaster, Yahoo" are customers "to die for." This may be true, but not in the way he thinks. This sort of company doesn't pay money for software (and doesn't contribute back code, usually). They tend to use without giving anything back. But generally speaking, I think his analysis is very good.
Take a look and see if you agree.
Disclosure: I'm an advisor to a few of the companies on VAR Guy's list. Clearly we both have good taste.
