The free lunch club
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For management outside of IT, the threat that open source is posing to Microsoft and other commercial companies is a sideshow, says Kenny MacIver.
For management outside of IT, the threat that open source is posing to Microsoft and other commercial software companies is a sideshow. All that matters to such techno-agnostics is that the software delivers business value - not always something IT can guarantee - and does not increase risk.
That risk element is something the commercial software vendors play on. They like to suggest that open source software is second best, unprofessional, even dangerous. And if you ask someone like Joe Alsop, the CEO of database and development tools house Progress Software, it is a matter of pride as well as survival. "If a commercial software company like ourselves can't do better than 20 graduates in a room, then we deserve to go out of business."
But there is a difference in doing better and doing a good-enough job. As our cover story this month shows, growing numbers of businesses and public bodies think a lot of the software stack they need - operating systems, application servers, content management systems, office products and more - can now be sourced from this 'good-enough', cost-free pool.
Where the big question continues to lie is what happens after product acquisition - where does the support come from and how good will it be? After all, survey after survey shows that post-sales service is one of the most significant considerations users have when selecting a vendor.
Companies selling support for open source software, such as Red Hat, JBoss and Novell, argue that they can actually do a better job than the commercial software crowd. Even though their fees are roughly equivalent to those of proprietary vendors, they claim they deliver greater value because they have no need to divert services revenue into the cost of product development.
Don't expect the likes of Microsoft or Oracle to give another inch without a fight. As open source software creeps up the enterprise software stack, the no-such-thing-as-free-software debate and the tactics of those whose interests are getting damaged can only get fiercer.
