TIMING IS EVERYTHING IN BUSINESS. FOR OPEN Source, the timing couldn’t be better. The dot com bubble burst, weakened economy, 9/11 and so on have put a big dent on corporate IT budgets. On the other hand, companies cannot stay competitive without investing in innovation and technology. In essence, companies have to do what they have to do—only now with less money. Enter “Open Source” to the rescue.

Cost savings are only the beginning. Let us consider a typical portal implementation. Once the requirements are defined, the choice of tools for implementation is many. Now, more than ever, Open Source is becoming an implementation vehicle of choice.

Typically, if X is $100K, the company has saved close to half million dollars on their portal implementation project. These numbers can make any CFO smile. Zero licensing cost is still the leading motivator for the move towards Open Source. There are, however a few more drivers that are accelerating open source adoption:

Lower TCO: Apart from lowering upfront acquisition cost to almost zero, Open Source software also has lowers the total cost of ownership. Support costs for MySQL for example is a tiny fraction of the support cost for commercial database software.

Greater Reliability: Interestingly, we are seeing that reliability is no longer an issue with at least the top few Open Source systems and applications. The popularity of Apache as a top choice web server validates this belief.
Flexibility: This is the biggest draw for the development community. While the commercial software opens up only certain interfaces, with open source, corporations can modify the source code. For the right technical team, this provides unparalleled flexibility.
Future Enhancements: Global developer community enhances the software. Non-proprietary nature speeds enhancements.

What are the challenges?
Let us look at some of the myths and challenges for open source. What are some of the things that companies are thinking before taking a leap into open source?
Lack of Vendor Support: With open source, the key contribution in development, QA and release comes from a sort of developer consortium. The question is “Who will support Open Source?” Corporations will implement Open Source applications on stand alone, non mission-critical applications until they find a “good” answer to the above question. Companies like Red Hat (for Linux), Covalent (for Apache), Zope Corporation (for Zope) are examples where there is a support for a fee option.
Viability of Open Source Vendors: Vendor longevity for any software product is of interest to corporations. Most people question the business models of companies depending on Open Source software. People constantly ask, “If they are not charging for the software, how else are they making money?”

One thing to note here is that these companies, while not charging money for selling software are also not spending oodles of money on developing them. Many Open Source vendors have a business model that may include (not limited to) providing support, building vertical applications, providing services, selling “premium” or add-on modules etc.

Perceived lack of talent: One more common (mis) conception is that there is a serious lack of development talent for Open Source languages, systems and applications. This is far from truth.
Ease of Use: It is a common perception that commercial software is easier to use than comparable open source software. The general feeling until now is that open source applications are neither packaged nor documented well. Open Source software has matured and this is no longer a serious problem.

If the many recent news announcements are any indication, governments are beginning to wake up to the potential for open source software used in government offices, and are starting to understand the benefits of open source to the whole community. Expect to see more and more public sector and non-profit organizations around the world utilizing open source software to build a better tomorrow for all of us!