Open Source - From Zero to Hero

I recently supervised an MBA student who did some research into open source solutions and their role in RSA. We are now collaborating on an article that we hope to publish together.

Up to now open source has been a niche player and serious enterprises have also considered this to be part of a "lunatic fringe". It was mainly adopted by fanatics and anti-mainstream users who did this as a matter of principle. Then we started to see governments and municipalities adopt the solutions. We began to see the mainstream proprietary players sit up and take notice.

What is happening? How do we see this changing business in the future? It does not matter whether one is discussing Apache, Jboss, Linux or Star office, one is looking at products that work and deliver value for money to a particular segment. The sweet spot for these solutions is now starting to broaden largely because the key obstacles to adoption are being dealt.

So what were these obstacles? The list below is not comprehensive but includes the bulk of the factors that will influence decision makers.

"The Dirty Dozen"

1. Lack of support
2. No future roadmap
3. No service level agreement
4. No major player to talk to
5. Installation and configuration problems
6. Lack of drivers or full product extensions
7. Future migration challenges
8. Integration challenges with widely used proprietary solutions ( and I did not mention windows, doors or other orifices)
9. No-one ever got fired for buying IBM, Oracle, Sap or Microsoft. So there is great inertia in the market.
10. Open system mean greater risk from a security perspective.
11. Too many variants of these so called standard products.
12. Who do I buy this from?

The consequence of all of this is on the total cost of ownership and so the business case for open source was not compelling.

We are now starting to see the open source movement get their act together and deal these issues.

HP and IBM's strategic support of Linux and sun's aggression on star office together with Google are examples of this. Novell's endorsement of a variant of Linux by purchasing Suse and the rapid growth of java all underpin these trends. Sun has now open sourced a version of Solaris and IBM is lifting patents on key components of its IP.

Linux on the server is now rated by Gartner as a mature deployment and all of our 25 deployments at standard bank are stable and deliver value. This forces us to review the basis on which we procure future technology.

So, there are good moves in the right direction! There is clear evidence of a tipping point here, no single action will cause this swing but the point is getting closer. Is it going to happen this year for your pc? Unlikely, but don't discount this over the next 5 to 10 years

What's next? My Blackberry runs java, my cell phone is on Symbian, my supermarket runs Linux on its tills and we all know that the bulk of the web sites in the world use apache. The next generation converged device in my lounge runs Linux and my favorite browser is Firefox. So the revolution is here! It’s not a tsunami! It’s like a slow squeeze, non threatening and unnoticeable.

There is no one thing that will swing this in the same way that there was no single thing that made the internet. It was incremental change that made this happen and slow adoption. SMTP, html, www, 56 bit encryption, mosaic (worlds first browser), apache, etc voila!!!!!!

The network effect is in action around us all the time! It’s changing us and it changes the world but we don't see it because it’s so slow.

Watch this space.