Open source acceptance grows

For years, corporate America shied away from open-source software, or OSS, because support would not be readily available for applications utilizing free source code. But doors have begun to open as firms have sprung up dedicated specifically to OSS support, such as Linux-products vendor Red Hat. Various data testify to the growing acceptance of OSS. Netcraft for instance tracks server trends, and in Nov. 2001 polled some 36 million web sites. Of those, more than 56 percent were operating their servers using Apache—an OSS Web server. Likewise, a June 2000 survey by research firm IDC found that GNU/Linux (another OSS platform) was the fastest-growing server platform, accounting for some 24 percent of all Internet and intranet servers installed in the prior year. That trend has continued. While IDC predicts an overall decline in revenues from server sales in 2002, the research firm expects the Linux server market will actually increase this year. In June 2001, an IBM survey likewise found 30 percent growth in the number of enterprise-level applications for GNU/Linux in the preceding six months. An Evans Data survey published in November 2001 found that nearly half of all international developers and almost 40 percent of North American developers had plans to target applications to GNU/Linux. While the software is free, its popularity is due to more than just the price tag. “A lot of people mistakenly think it is about price, but it’s not,” says Carl Howe, principal analyst of an August 2000 Forrester Research report that found open source software is use by some 56 percent of the world’s 2,500 largest organizations. Forrester has no new numbers to offer. But Howe agrees that the general perception is that mainstream acceptance of OSS continues to grow. “In fact, corporations actually like paying for software, because they feel like it gives them leverage over the vendors” in terms of service and support, he says. “So why use open source? The answer is pretty simple: It is just a better way to develop software. You get faster turnaround in the development process when you use OSS.” Likewise, says Howe, OSS today can actually give an enterprise user a broader selection of vendors than can proprietary software. “Unlike proprietary code, where a vendor says, ‘Ours is just as good as the other guy’s, only different’—with open source you can buy something that is just as good and exactly the same from one vendor to another.” Two vendors working with proprietary code could write two very different programs to achieve the same outcome. Their apps would do the same thing, but would not be the same. Two OSS vendors, on the other hand, would use identical code to perform identical operations. So if the products are literally identical, that means vendors have to compete on the service front—a decided plus for developers, who must at times rely on the vendors for service. OSS also offers an especially vibrant development community. “If you want a change made to Windows, the number of people who can do that is quite small, just a handful of people at Microsoft,” Howe says. “With open source, I can hire people in India or China or anywhere else in the world who know how to program with open source coding, and if they don’t know they can learn.” lection. They created and retrieved the archived information, and created a user interface for the collection, in 27 hours. Thibodeau says the successful experimentation and increased interest from both government funders and private sector entities is encouraging. “I’ve been in this field since 1975, and in the last five years, people in my own profession and related fields have awakened to the fact that this is an important problem,” he says. “So my sense is, even though we’re a quiet voice now, it’s a voice getting more and more attention.”