Contrary to published reports and popular opinion alike, the most important impact of open source on the enterprise has not been on pricing. The single most important impact of open source upon the enterprise has been the removal of barriers to entry and adoption – all thanks to open source’s ability to empower individual developers and architects.
By Stephen O’Grady
For years following the introduction and popularization of instant-messaging technologies in the consumer space, it was not uncommon for CIOs and IT managers to be entirely unaware of IM’s widespread adoption and employment within the very enterprises they managed.
But the combination of high-value yet freely available technologies proved irresistible for organizations of all shapes and sizes, and whether those in charge liked it or not, IM grew into a vital communications channel. It grew, in fact, like a weed — much like the growth of open source.
Contrary to published reports and popular opinion alike, the most important impact of open source on the enterprise has not been on pricing. Even though it does exert downward price pressures in markets where it has a credible offering, and even though it does — as we’ll see in a moment — alter the economics of said markets, open source applications that run in production within the enterprise are rarely “free” in a cost sense.
Nor should the primary focus be on code quality. With the code available for anyone to see and critique, it does encourage quality development practices and compel even closed source alternatives to keep up. Still, it’s difficult to quantify this value in any meaningful way.
No, the single most important impact of open source upon the enterprise has been the removal of barriers to entry and adoption, much as instant messaging and other consumer technologies before it.
Consider that just a few short years ago, virtually any enterprise development project required not only bodies but a budget — a significant budget, one that provided development tools for developers, databases for the data, application servers for the applications, and operating system licenses on which all of them would run. Today, all of these can be had at no cost, and with no budget. Budget may become a factor when the end result of the developers’ labor is deployed to production, but the software costs for pilot projects or departmental applications is — or at least can be — zero.
More importantly, developers no longer require permission or approval for their infrastructure. They have been emancipated, in a very real sense, from the oversight implicit in for-pay infrastructures. Developers, in other words, are in charge in a way that would have been impossible prior to the introduction of open source.
The important role that open source assets such as the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP, Python and Perl languages — which together are commonly referred to as the LAMP stack — play amongst major Web companies such as Google (GOOG) or Yahoo (YHOO) has been well documented. What is perhaps less well understood is just how important these are to the more traditional enterprise. All of the above play vital parts in businesses all over the world — yours included, most likely.
None of those projects, however, became as popular as they are today because of management, or analysts, or the media. These components were popularized by the volume of developers that used them, and used them because they could — because they’re free and open source, and therefore there were no barriers to entry to doing so.
Open source has fundamentally altered the process of procurement, evaluation and deployment by empowering individual developers and architects. Instead of fighting this trend, CIOs and other technology executives would be better served by embracing it. Work closely with your developers to get an idea of what they’re using to solve business problems, because it’s highly likely that you’ll be writing checks for commercial support in the near future.
Stephen O’Grady is a principal analyst with the research group RedMonk.
Stephen,
Excellent article!
I’m not an IT type of guy, but do run a Linux OS, and maintain a Linux Web Site using all those free opensource goodies. The collaboration that I receive is global, and amazing! As I said I’m not an IT guy.
Do IT guys sit around thinking of ways to advance the company, or just do daily up-dates / maintenance? Please don’t flame me here, but there are obvious barriers up, and in-force.
JJMacey aka Adler
“Developers, in other words, are in charge in a way that would have been impossible prior to the introduction of open source.”
My own view is that this is only half, albeit the critical half, of deriving the full benefits of open source. The other part is ongoing development with and around the full range of community members and their activities.
In the same way that lowering of barriers empowers many more developers, collaboration with constiuencies could empower many times the number of participants. I also believe that such a model naturally yields far greater returns for all involved.
Vera
My manager asks me to test all kinds of open source software all the time but develops cold feet just at the last moment before deployment in production..of course I cannot wine and dine him the way the commercial vendors does. But till date for each opensource software that I tested I did a very complete objective analysis and a side by side comparison with their commercial counterparts and everytime the opensource software met all the requirements plus more ( I freely scripted/programmed what we needed). Can someone tell me what to do next?
Yes, yes, yes. At Vyatta, we definitely believe this is one of the fundamental differences between open source and closed source. With closed source, everybody is locked up with the typical organizational control structures exerting undue influence (signature loops, technology evaluation committees, etc.). Open source flies right past all those controls and allows soldiers in the trenches to “just get on with it.” Once the technology has penetrated and proven successful, it’s harder to argue that it can’t/won’t work. Essentially, open source is perfectly aligned with the old saw that it’s better to ask forgiveness than to seek permission.
Let me paraphrase this dumb article, “It’s not that open source brings costs down that matters, what matters is that open source brings costs down for developers.” In order to try and make your unoriginal thesis sound original, you contradict yourself in the setup. Costs are down across the board, that’s what matters.
“More importantly, developers no longer require permission or approval for their infrastructure.”
What color are the clouds in your world? No real CIO/CTO wants developers installing their own infrastructure. Besides the obvious security issues, you have to deal with asset management, network management.
Allowing anyone to install whatever they want, open source or not, is no way to run an infrastructure.
I would support Vera’s comment yes such a model would benefit everyone involved.