Without ballyhoo or headlines, open source is eating
away at the enterprise computing core and moving steadily
outwards.
Open source desktops are here already, but I believe it will be
at least three years before we see any real effect on the
Microsoft-dominated corporate desktop. So on the surface nothing
looks untoward, but a look inside tells a very different story.
A factor in this phenomenon is the steady commoditisation of
Intel/AMD-based computers. Supercomputing power is now readily
available for commercial and academic use, running on Linux
clusters. Oil companies have been keen proponents of these
clustered installations to process exploration and geophysical
data.
The most conservative of all sectors, finance, has worked out
the productivity and economic gains of open source. Tales of banks
conducting widescale replacements of proprietary Unix systems in
favour of Linux are circulating in City pubs.
In industries where margins are tight, such as web hosting and
internet services, open source software has been used widely for
years. Companies are deploying multiple web and e-mail servers
without necessarily worrying about incurring software licence
costs. With the right skills you can buy your hardware and
configure your choice of open source operating system and e-mail
server software. Advances in distribution have made installing
Linux almost as easy as setting up Windows.
Elsewhere, companies are integrating open source software into
products as diverse as domestic ADSL routers, vending machines and
in-car navigation systems.
But the real traction for open source software is from the
inside out. Developers and system administrators are quietly
adopting open source. With numbers of downloads and noise on
bulletin boards growing, technology companies are quickly realising
there are business benefits from ownership, sponsorship and
adoption of open source software.
A remarkable example is the Eclipse integrated development
environment, used by programmers to write and maintain software. A
non-profit group formed in 2001 by IBM, Borland and Red Hat started
a project to develop a software toolset. This framework, Eclipse,
can be extended to include multiple programming languages.
Today a cursory search on a leading jobs website returned 128
matches for Eclipse developer skills. Eclipse has seemingly won
developer hearts and minds without the usual promotional
fanfare.
Not everything in the garden is rosy. The European Union's
software patents farce, the remnants of the SCO copyright lawsuit
against IBM and others, licence complexity, code forks and
perceptions of support issues still remain in the IT profession's
collective consciousness.
Most of these issues are bumps on the road and will in time
dissipate, although some will need careful stewardship by the open
source community.
Governments are lining up behind open source as a mechanism to
see off dependency on both corporate and anglophone software. The
Openoffice alternative to Microsoft Office has had a major beta
release, with the Indian government backing a mass distribution of
a Tamil version as a highly successful and polished open source
package.
Measuring the amount of installed open source software will
always be an inexact science, for the simple reason that you do not
have to register the software or buy a CD to use it. But what is
irrefutable is that traditional global software suppliers are now
supporting Linux.
This year has been interesting; the coming years will be even
more so.
Patrick Tarpey is chairman of the BCS Open Source Specialist
Group and system architect for a leading UK public body