August - 2003 issue > Feature

By Ted Schadler

OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IS QUIETLY changing the dynamics of the software industry. Enterprises as diverse as FedEx, Morgan Stanley, Oracle, and Google are running enterprise workloads on open source software like Linux and Apache—often on low-cost, Intel-based servers. So what’s the ultimate impact of open source software on corporations, vendors, and service providers? Quite simply, to bring commodity values—low-cost, high-reliability, and wide choice—to infrastructure software.

Despite its recent rise to fame, open source software isn’t new—after all, it’s anchored the Internet with BIND and Sendmail for decades and runs more Web servers than any proprietary alternative. What’s different now? Open source software —and the hardware from Intel and AMD that most users run it on—has passed the good-enough point. Put another way, today’s open source rewards outweigh the risks (see Fig. 1).

But sorting through the open source propaganda and avoiding open source choices that don’t make sense—like desktop operating systems—isn’t easy. To avoid these gaffes, start your strategy planning process with answers to these questions:
• What’s different about open source software?
• Which open source products should firms use?
• What’s the right open source deployment strategy?
•What’s Different About Open Source Software?

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