Apr
27
Written by:
Paula Hunter
4/27/2010 11:18 AM
The OSBC 2010 Conference in San Francisco this year convinced me that we are at the cusp of a new wave of open source awareness and adoption. This next monumental wave is building now; but it’s not happening in bug bashes or web groups or university classrooms. It’s happening in business meetings, among savvy CIOs and CTOs and CEOs who may not know JavaScript from espresso latte – but are clearly sold on the business case for multi-source development, including but not limited to open source.
A few words of wisdom from industry luminaries are provided in this video, and I continue my thoughts below.
The CodePlex Foundation is well situated for this next stage, and it’s exciting for those of us who are working toward a vision of open source and multi-source development that combines practical business sense with community responsibility and creative collaboration. We firmly believe that open source stands to benefit businesses in all sectors by offering a toolbox brimming with practical, shared IP that reduces the opportunity cost of in-house software development – and allows companies to devote more time and resources toward products and services that are original and add genuine value.
So a new wave is coming. But first off, let’s acknowledge that IT developers are already sold on open source, and have been for a while.
Jeff Hammond of Forrester Research noted at an OSBC panel discussion that I moderated that when it comes to open source, “developers in enterprise IT have figured it out.” According to a survey Jeff conducted in 2009, only one in five developers has not used open source in commercial deployments. So four out of five developers are coding with open source. And that’s just about everybody, among developers at least. The corporate side is a different story, but growing corporate acceptance is the next wave I see coming.
Successful business executives are bold and uncompromising when it comes to the vision they want to achieve over the long term, but pragmatic when it comes to running their companies day to day. Integration of open source into the development model is a pragmatic way to make bold visions happen. Pragmatic decision makers realize that where software code comes from is irrelevant as long as the code does the job and license agreements are respected and followed. As Black Duck Software President and CEO Tim Yeaton said at OSBC, it boils down to the fact that “companies are looking to find the shortest path to a solution.” If companies are compliant with license agreements and contribute back to the open source ecosystem when they should, parsing the origins of code, whether it be open source, third party, or homegrown, is more of a metaphysical exercise than one of practical consideration.
Of course, “contributing back” are two words that don’t generally find their way into the P and L statements of most enterprises (beyond charitable contributions, anyway). While it is disappointing, it may not be surprising that only 20 percent of companies are giving back development to the open source community, according to Jeff Hammond’s research, even though 80 percent are using it in some way.
Others may beg to differ, but I don’t believe that this discrepancy is due to any sort of organized conspiracy on the part of companies to gouge the open source software community and exploit the energy and ideas of generous, well-meaning developers around the globe and leave nothing in return. After all, businesses are motivated by self-interest, and it’s in their practical self-interest to make sure that the open source exosystem remains healthy and vigorous. As Sonoa VP and CodePlex Foundation Board Member Sam Ramji pointed out OSBC, IT shops “may not want to show up every single day and participate in bug bashes. But if they’ve changed something, they don’t want to experience the cost of reintegrating that patch in every new version of HTTP'D.”
Rather, the discrepancy between the use of open source in the commercial enterprise (widespread) and their level of contributing back (minimal) is because good developers are more often creative visionaries motivated by the desire to build things that work well than people who enjoy sitting in board rooms making the business case for open source. Although it is changing, many C-level executives remain in the dark about what code is being used where, or even about what open source is to begin with.
If you are an executive who has to make business decisions, not paying attention to open source – or even worse, putting your head in the sand about it – isn’t likely to save you any sleep in the long run. Companies who view open source strictly as an IT issue and don’t acknowledge potential business and legal ramifications could end up expending much more time and energy on OSS business and legal concerns than those who do, diminishing the value proposition considerably.
Since compliance is essential from the perspective of fiduciary responsibility and common sense, good governance processes are key when it comes to integrating open source in the development process. Damien Eastwood, former VP of Legal at Sun Microsystems, put it this way at OSBC: “The easier you make it, the easier it is for the engineers [to] actually embrace [governance] and that’s key, because I guarantee you they’re using it. It’s cheap, it’s free, it’s good enough and they want to get their projects done.”
How has your own company been when it comes to open source acceptance? At our panel discussion, Jeff Hammond described the five stages of open source acceptance, which is included in video embedded in this page. Read the transcript, listen to the audio, watch the video. Regardless of the medium that reaches you, we want you to be thinking about the ways in which open source is affecting your company, project, or initiative now – or how it could in the future. Join the conversation.