What’s IT all about?

Open Source Software (OSS), i.e. software that is freely distributable without licence fee, has been around for a long time. The best known and most widespread child of that concept, Linux, is in use across the world, running mission-critical services in environments ranging from large data centres to one-man bands. OSS has given a genuine alternative to the Microsoft stronghold for small businesses (see my Life without Microsoft article), as well as continuing to underpin the majority or websites across the world in the guise of the Apache webserver.

I read, with interest, a recent email from VMWare that illustrated just how the very concept of Open Source software is starting to impact directly on licenced software products. The email was announcing the new VMWare Virtual Appliance Marketplace, an area where self-contained virtual machines with a specific purpose can be showcased and made available for others to try out. Some of the appliances utilise licenced software and are not free, but many merely pull together OSS products and add some configuration. The end result is a free virtual machine that you can download and run within the free VMWare Player to add a particular function to your network. For example, you might want to add a web proxy server with content filtering without having to download Squid and Dansguardian and configuring them from scratch. So instead, you can go to the Virtual Appliance Marketplace and download one of many submitted there, such as this one.

When I initially read the email, I was immediately struck by the similarity to another OSS marketplace I had come across in the Notes/Domino world, namely the OpenNTF site. This is a website whereby applications developed in the Notes/Domino environment can be made freely available to all (NTF is the file extension for Notes Template Files, application templates to you and me). And, like the VMWare marketplace, it contains some applications that one would normally expect to pay a large licence fee to use. Popular applications include a blogging tool (Blogsphere) and a Wiki application (DominoWiki), although there are many others.

You might wonder why Open Source is so popular, not just with consumers of the software but with developers too. Certainly, at first glance, it can be difficult to see why a developer would want to put so much blood, sweat and tears into an application without making any money out of it. But from the developers point of view it can have some very good benefits. Not only is it a way of honing your development skills, but it also raises your profile in a way that can be referred to in future job interviews (not dissimilar to a consultant giving presentations at seminars to demonstrate their expertise in a certain area). Finally, it removes the need to ’sell a product’, so the developer doesn’t have to worry about marketing and taking payments and providing support and so on. Although frequently the developer will find that happy customers are very willing to make a contribution towards their costs.

For consumers of OSS, there is the obvious benefit of not having to pay licence fees, and the opportunity afforded to properly evaluate a product without having to worry about artificial deadlines or crippled versions of software. However, it also removes one of the frustrations frequently experience by large organisations when they encounter a bug in some software. Instead of having to wait for the licence holder to replicate the bug, produce a fix, test the fix and release it to customers; they can just go ahead and fix the bug themselves. The only obligation is to release the fix back into the OSS community so that others may benefit from it.

What is the future of OSS ? Difficult to say. I think there will be a continued move away from licenced software and towards OSS until a balance is found. It is possible that licenced software will die away completely, but that may have serious implications on the development of new software as well as the provision of support to smaller organisations. I’m sure the pendulum will continue to sway back and forth for some time yet, but eventually a happy medium will be found.