The Mysteries of Open Source

In many organizations, the architecture is determined by vendors selling miraculous wares to executives in exchange for golf outings. To prevent any dissent among the ranks, vendors distribute T-shirts, coffee mugs, and assorted trinkets as forms of bribery. The grand vision of becoming an organizational hero simply by championing the purchase of big-dollar expenditures on hardware and software is rapidly disappearing.

Open source and GNU (www.gnu.org) will sooner or later penetrate the enterprise architecture of many organizations it is inevitable. The practical architect will embrace open source as a solution to business problems and may even become an advocate of it. Others will remain hesitant to consider it because of beliefs perpetuated by software vendors who hint that it is unsupported and written by shaggy college kids who may disappear for year-long sabbaticals in China or Germany. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A recent study by Boston Consulting Group found that professional network administrators and developers with an average of 11 years of information technology experience comprise the open source community. Furthermore, 30 percent of that community indicated that they will have to answer to their bosses if they don't write open source code.

Many well-respected Fortune 500 organizations are not only using open source but actively contributing to its development. Technologies such as Apache, Linux, JBoss, and JUnit are dominant within their respective categories. Many of the Web sites for open source initiatives contain links for making donations. Consider having your CIO click on such a link. Others have figured out that supporting open source is also good for other reasons.

One agile organization was spending over $1 million on a particular J2EE application server when it realized it could avoid further expenditures by embracing open source. It figured that the salaries for two highly compensated Java developers working on open source J2EE application servers would be much cheaper than paying the support charges of the respective J2EE vendor. Furthermore, having access to code and two individuals in-house with intimate knowledge helped the organization solve problems faster. It also noticed that morale increased because junior developers appreciated having at-will access to two developers. The two newly hired developers also conducted application design reviews, which further increased the quality of software within the organization.

Enterprises should consider contributing to the open source movement as an investment. Organizations that leverage open source for competitive advantage save money by utilizing the output from various projects. It is in their best interest to give something back, whether it is in the form of financial support or contributing a developer's time to extend the platforms the enterprise depends on.