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Effective IT Report 2010 – Open source software certainly has a part to play in the IT industry’s mainstream. How large a part is still unclear, however

Once it was the avant garde of the IT industry, an anti-establishment rebellion that sought to wrest control of software design from the clutches of vendors and restore it to ‘the people’. Such has been the success of the open source movement, however, that today it is just another facet of the IT establishment.

It is hard to imagine a more concrete confirmation of this fact than the endorsement of open source software made in early 2009 by both the UK government and the Conservative Party. Before his departure from the post following the MPs’ expenses scandal, the government’s minister for digital engagement, Tom Watson, wrote that open source software was “one of the most significant cultural developments in IT and beyond over the last two decades” and has shown how large organisations including governments “can become more innovative, agile and cost-effective by building on the fruits of community work”.

Those comments followed a commitment from the Conservatives to give greater consideration to open source software in government IT projects should they come to power. “These proposals are not just about saving money,” said shadow chancellor George Osborne at the time. “They are about modernising government, making the public sector more innovative and improving public services.”

There were mixed signals regarding open source adoption in the Effective IT Survey. The strategy of having “Adopted open source applications” has been applied by 40.4% of respondents, moving it up from the 11th most adopted strategy last year to 8th this time round. The strategy of adopting Linux in the data centre, however, slipped from the 16th most adopted strategy last year to 19th this year, with 29% of the sample having adopted it. And Linux on the desktop continues to be the least adopted strategy (11.5% of respondents) and one of the least effective.
In terms of performance, however, the first two of these open source strategies shone out. Data centre Linux and open source applications were the second and third most likely strategies to have delivered the expected return on investment, and were ranked sixth and fourth respectively for effectiveness.

The recession may not have triggered a landslide of open source adoption, but for some vendors whose business is based on open source software – which typically make their money from support charges rather than licence fees – 2009 was a strong year. Red Hat, for example, which supports an enterprise version of the Linux operating system as well as the JBoss middleware stack, recently announced an 18% revenue increase for the third quarter of its financial year; most software companies have struggled even to match their 2008 revenue performance.

As that reflects, open source has not only become more mainstream in terms of the organisations that endorse and adopt it, but is also an increasingly commercial affair. Many companies have made their fortunes from ‘free’ software, and traditional vendors are a growing influence in the open source movement.

Some have taken part in open source development for years. IBM, for example, is the principal contributor to the code base of the Linux operating system. But the extent to which this has become an established strategy for traditional, commercial IT vendors was revealed when Microsoft – long seen as the arch enemy of open source – released 2,000 lines of code that allow the Linux operating system to run on its Hyper V hypervisor under an open source licence.

Admittedly, this move says as much about Microsoft’s predicament in the virtualisation market – it must court open source users if it is to counter VMware’s near monopoly in enterprise virtualisation – as it does about its attitude towards open source, but it certainly proves that the old distinctions between open source and commercial software are not as clear as they once were.

Opening databases

Nowhere are these distinctions under as much pressure as they are in the database world. Enterprise adoption of open source database software is widespread and growing: Gartner research found that 79% of large organisations had some open source database software within their infrastructure in 2008, up from 49% in 2007, and predicts that the industry will be worth $1 billion by 2013. To date, implementations have typically focused on peripheral, non-mission-critical systems, but that too is gradually changing.

The commercial organisation behind MySQL, one of the leading open source database systems, was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008 for a staggering $1 billion. Despite being a large corporation, Sun had a reputation for engineering innovation and an understanding of open source that meant this was not widely opposed by the open source community.

Indeed, MySQL was to be the figurehead of Sun’s ‘commercial open source’ strategy, the bedrock of a business selling support to users who download software for free. It would be churlish to blame this for the ensuing financial disaster that befell Sun, the roots of which ran much deeper, but it was a severe blow to the idea of making the kind of money Silicon Valley giants are used to from open source.

Since then, of course, software giant Oracle stepped in to acquire Sun Microsystems (after a bid by IBM was rejected by investors). Still being blocked by the European Commission at the time of going to press due to worries that Oracle’s ownership of MySQL would be anti-competitive given its existing dominance of enterprise database software, the deal has also drawn the opposition of open source advocates, not least Monty Widenius, MySQL’s original creator, who fear that the ongoing development of the product will be terminated under Oracle’s ownership.

Oracle counters this argument by pointing to other open source systems that it has acquired in the past and that it still maintains. Clearly, though, managing the MySQL project (if it is allowed to acquire the company associated with it) without frightening off the programmers who voluntarily build and develop the code base will be quite a challenge for Oracle.

One of the many reasons this episode is being so eagerly scrutinised by the IT industry is that it may set a blueprint for the commercialisation of open source software: Oracle’s treatment of MySQL will influence whether investors see potential in future open source projects and the businesses built around them.

This is salient for end-user organisations because the commercial viability of the businesses that provide support for open source systems determines the long-term viability of adopting the software itself.