Chapter 1. The Nature of Open Source
| This book is a long and thorough answer to the question, is open source right for you? The intended audience is the typical Information Technology (IT) department that is charged with supporting a business with appropriate application of technology. This book is written from an IT department's perspective and is organized around the common problems that face those who struggle in the trenches. The goal of Open Source for the Enterprise is to help technology and business executives determine whether they can benefit from using open source in their environments. Open source began as free software built by thousands of volunteers who shared the results of their work without charging any fees. Billions of dollars of value has been created based on this simple structure. The adoption of open source software has become a cultural phenomenon. The basic facts regarding the growth of the open source movement are amazing. Open source success stories are well known and more arise every week. For instance, the city of Munich chose OpenOffice.org, an open source suite of desktop applications, very publicly sticking a finger in the eye of Microsoft, which aggressively sought the contract. Amazon.com dumped Sun hardware and software in favor of Linux, the most popular open source operating system available. Apache, an open source web server architecture, is the most popular web server in the world. Perl, a robust scripting language, is used to run huge, highly scalable sites such as Ticketmaster. Large financial companies are creating massive clusters of Linux machines for crunching numbers in complex portfolio analysis. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The examples of corporate success for open source would fill a phone book. Internationally, open source is being adopted by entire governments. Smaller communities are using it to create versions for their specific languages. China, Brazil, Thailand, Peruare all adopting open source software officially and are spending millions to improve the software and encourage its adoption. All of this success has changed the nature of open source. No longer can one assume that the typical open source project comprises a small band of programmers toiling away in obscurity. Major technology vendors got open source religion and made broad and long-term commitments to open source software. IBM released as open source its Eclipse platform for creating development tools, a project on which it spent $40 million. IBM has become the largest corporate proponent of Linux, and it spends hundreds of millions of dollars to support and market that platform. Hewlett-Packard uses open source in all sorts of ways, from supporting development of useful projects to releasing device drivers into the marketplace. Novell has purchased several major open source-related companies, and is creating a large and integrated collection of open source applications for enterprise use. Nearly every important enterprise-grade software product has support for Linux. Even commercial web servers based on Apache are available, including Hewlett-Packard's Secure Web Server for OpenVMS. Companies large and small have taken to open source as a way to increase collaboration, reduce development costs, provide a friendly platform for their products, and sell services. For an IT department, the stakes can be high. Becoming the sort of IT department that can successfully use open source means empowerment, saving hard dollars and ensuring freedom from captivity to vendors. Other significant benefits include:
But gaining these benefits comes with responsibilities. Installing open source does not mean all your problems are solved. To use open source and support it in a commercial environment, IT departments must learn to:
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