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| Open Source Forges Ahead in the Enterprise - User Experiences |
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Friday, December 02 2005 @ 02:18 PM EST
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Yesterday, the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council's Open Source Software Special Interest Group held a meeting titled "Open Source and the Enterprise: Enterprise Adoption". The meeting had two parts. The first part was a presentation by Nick Gall, Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, which you can read about on Paul Gillin's blog, Musings on Technology. Audio is not yet available, but Gillin reports that Gall said the following, among other things: The takeaways I got ... is that open source software (OSS) has clearly turned the corner in the enterprise and is now seated at the table with the software elite....Gall sees the action shifting quickly from infrastructure markets where the LAMP stack is already well-established into applications. ... Gall said, "By 2010, software companies that don’t incorporate OSS into offered solutions risk becoming uncompetitive due to the cost of in-house engineering." Wow. Talk about making it to the big leagues.
The business model for open-source vendors certainly is different. These companies spend less on development because much of that work is done in the community. They also spend less on distribution, since trial downloads are the way the software spreads. These companies have a leaner business model and, at least for now, get closer to their customers, according to the two Fidelity speakers at the event. Those speakers -- Mike Askew and Charles Pickelhaupt -- agreed that open-source suppliers tend to be more accommodating of their needs and more responsive to their requests.
The Gartner audio should be available next week from Dan Bricklin, who led the meetings and made the recordings. It includes some discussion about the GPL and what enterprise needs from the new version being worked on now.
The second part (for which a recording is available) consisted of two presentations by large IT users, followed by a discussion. The first presenter was Julie Atkins, Director of IT Operations and Info Security from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. The second presentation, which took up most of the time, was by Michael Askew and Charles Pickelhaupt of Fidelity Investments' Center for Applied Technology.
They talked about Fidelity's history with Open Source. Gillin again reports: Fidelity has an open mind about all things open source but does put candidates through the wringer. Open-source alternatives to existing applications must demonstrate comparable functionality and go before a review board that sets standards for certification, support and maintenance.
Though open source is an exciting new opportunity, the wild-west nature of the market is still an irritation to some users. Fidelity VP Charles Pickelhaupt noted that his firm has counted 58 different variations of open-source licenses. And code revision cycles that can lead to daily builds can make version control a chore. Nevertheless, Fidelity is charging ahead. Not only is OSS comparable to proprietary alternatives in most cases, "Many people think it's superior," he said I hope that motivates you to help reduce the number of FOSS licenses, particularly if you want your work to be used in the enterprise. The Fidelity people talk about why they use Open Source, why they like it sometimes more than similar products that are proprietary (it's not because of the lower up-front cost), and how they determine what to let in, how they do training, etc. This presentation will be of interest to anyone using or considering using Open Source in their company. There were lots of questions from the attendees, many of whom are lawyers and consultants.
To listen to the hour-long recording, you can find a link on the OSS SIG's wiki page about it or
on Dan Bricklin's blog.
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| Authored by: tiger99 on Friday, December 02 2005 @ 03:01 PM EST |
| If any, to help PJ. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, December 02 2005 @ 03:04 PM EST |
| Corrections [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: tiger99 on Friday, December 02 2005 @ 03:04 PM EST |
It would be nice if you could make the site work better by making clickable
links when they will be useful. Do remember to post in HTML mode, though.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, December 02 2005 @ 03:32 PM EST |
They also spend less on distribution, since trial downloads are
the way the software spreads.
I find this statement a tad
misleading. FOSS projects offer downloads of their software solutions which are
production ready - not 'trial' downloads.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, December 02 2005 @ 04:36 PM EST |
| My company is run (TIOUW.com in dutch)
completely from Open Source software. Linux servers, Apache, php, CRM (XRMS),
Serendipity for my weblog. Whenever I need more functionality I search for the
open source version.
I am so grateful for open source software, that I actively
promote open source software to my customers. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: philc on Friday, December 02 2005 @ 05:27 PM EST |
For a lot of businesses the bottom line rules. Things that reduce the bottomline
have to prove their value and worth.
Part of the value is control. How much control does the company get over the
product. The second is cost, up front because that hits the budget in the
purchase year and ongoing expenses. Of these the purchase cost can hurt the
most.
I am not surprised businesses are looking seriously at OSS. I agree that vendors
that don't have an OSS story are going to hurt.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, December 02 2005 @ 07:28 PM EST |
How is this an issue? Commercial software have a different license for each
sofware *title* (not even each company).
I would think they would be releaved there are only 58 different licenses.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: bbaston on Friday, December 02 2005 @ 08:56 PM EST |
Open source may find an incredible boost in enterprise use because of licensing
unification. This fact
"Fidelity VP Charles Pickelhaupt noted that
his firm has counted 58 different variations of open-source
licenses."
is not in itself a negative. My perhaps optimistic hope
is that Apache and GPL will merge with GPLv3 acceptance. If that happens, other
important open source licensees may come aboard to futher open source license
unification.
So I fervently hope that all 50 some odd license authors will
jump in and participate in the GPLv3 process!
---
Ben, Groklawian in
training
IMBW, IANAL2, IMHO, IAVO
imaybewrong, iamnotalawyertoo, inmyhumbleopinion, iamveryold
Have you donated to Groklaw this month? [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: PSaltyDS on Friday, December 02 2005 @ 09:02 PM EST |
We have been infiltrating Linux into our Windows shop over the last year or so.
It has been easy to see which companies see Linux as part of their total market,
and which ones won't. Some things that have come up in the
process:
Good experience -- QLogic HBA: QLogic makes and
supports the fibre channel HBAs we use with the SAN storage unit on our bench.
Outstanding tech support, and they speak Linux fluently.
Bad
experience -- Primera CD printer: Primera not only doesn't support linux
drivers on their printers, they seem outright hostile to the idea. Their tech
support is one of those semi-bot online chats, and the guy I chatted with was
downright rude. I asked if they had a Linux driver for one of their CD printers
and he said no. I asked why and he said something like "Why would we waste our
money on such a small market." When I tried to point out that they would only
have to publish the software interface specs and the community would write a
driver for them... the chat session ended with a terse "Is there anything
ELSE...?"
Good experience -- HP LaserJet5si Mopier and Color
LaserJet 4550: Postscript and IPP support mean they both "just work" with my
RedHat and SuSE boxes. CUPS .ppd files are everywhere for these printers.
Ought to be true of any standards compliant PS printers.
Sideways
experience -- ActiveCard USB CAC reader: Linux drivers were available, but
only for specific RedHat versions and as part of a purchased binary middleware
package. Couldn't get it working with our versions of WhiteBox, Knoppix, or
SuSE. ActiveCard wasn't much help, but we might have gotten farther if we'd
been geekier with Linux.
---
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insuficiently advanced." - Geek's
Corrolary to Clarke's Law
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, December 02 2005 @ 10:00 PM EST |
The "User Experience" MP3 is hosted by something called
"peapodcast.com" and the link from the Wiki page wasn't working at
6:50 Pacific time 12/02/05.
Probably got "Slashdotted" and pulled it...
[ Reply to This | # ]
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- Fixed! - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, December 02 2005 @ 10:47 PM EST
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| Authored by: Dan Bricklin on Friday, December 02 2005 @ 11:08 PM EST |
For those of you who tried downloading and got 404 errors or equivalent, it is
now fixed. The podcast XML feed was correct (so I saw downloads coming in), but
the link on the wiki to the MP3 file was wrong (which I foolishly didn't test to
save a 30MB download...). I'm sorry. Try again. Next time, if one of my podcast
downloads doesn't work, let me know right away. I didn't know until the person
above posted it on Groklaw. (Also, next time I'll read the "errors"
list in my server log more carefully...)
-Dan Bricklin[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: dan_d on Friday, December 02 2005 @ 11:54 PM EST |
I work for a very large company. I won't name it, but suffice it to say it is
highly placed on the Fortune 500.
We have not yet adopted a formal technology acquisition policy for open source,
which is odd come to think of it, but we've reached a point now where we
consider open source solutions very seriously and have deployed several. Linux,
Apache, PHP, and Squid are major ones. Others like Sourceforge, MySQL and Perl
pop up here and there. I feel pretty good now that we've reached a point where
ideology isn't really part of the discussion any more, and we focus on issues
like cost of installation, cost of maintenance, scalability, vendor support
(yes, there has to be a vendor. It might be the hardware vendor or the OS
vendor, but there has to be a vendor), and likelihood that the technology will
work for us for as long as we need it to (which could well be decades depending
on the application).
In such decisions the fact that OSS licenses free us from dependency on a single
supplier that might change its licensing policy or go out of business certainly
factors in.
OSS on the desktop has made only small inroads so far, but we are looking into
it.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Jude on Saturday, December 03 2005 @ 11:41 AM EST |
I work for a fairly large company, which I won't name because I am not
authorized to speak for them.
My employer had their lawyers review all of the widely-used open source licenses
and put the results on an internal website that any employee can visit. Each
license was assigned to one of the following categories:
A) Feel free to use software that is under this license
B) Management review needed
C) Do not use
Curiously, the Firefox license is in category C. I asked the lawyers why, and
they explained that there is a "gotcha" in the patent language: If a
competitor of ours contributed to Firefox, there could be problems if that
competitor infringed one of our patents and we had to sue. Suing a Firefox
contributor for patent infringement would result in revocation of our licence to
use Firefox, which would be a major hassle if Firefox were widely deployed in
the company.
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