Opensource software - a revolution or just a side show?

I first became intrigued by the opensource movement ¹, ironically when I was helping to set up and develop a VC funded software business. It has become quite common place for opensource software tools to be used by most software developers/companies, and indeed the Internet would not function today without major tools and operating systems like Apache and Linux, but application software has remained the province of companies that ask you to pay a software license and more often than not an annual support fee as well.

The usual argument that application software companies raise is that you shouldn't trust your important software applications to a "bunch of amateurs" - but as I have progressively discovered this is far too simplistic and in many cases the argument is completely turned on its head.

Putting aside the commercial advantages of no software license ² fees, I would argue that use of a product from a well founded opensource software project is actually a lower risk than use of a traditionally licensed product from a small software company.

A large proportion of software companies have less than 100 employees, which means the development team may be very small, perhaps less than 15 people, and they always seem to have more urgent priorities than your reported bug or new feature request. Also how many businesses that start to use a proprietary software product actually bother to negotiate a full escrow arrangement that would release the software code if the company went bust - and if the worse case situation occurred what would you do with the code anyway? Contrast this with a significant opensource project which may have hundreds of developers and the source code is always freely available.

As you may have guessed I have become quite evangelical about opensource and indeed have based my company Enmore Services on the use of one specific product - Tiki CMS Groupware.

I had been using this software for a number of years (actually to support my family history research) and had become a keen, albeit a slightly frustrated user. My frustration was rooted in not fully understanding the application - but I had recognised its potential, so as part of the development of Enmore Services I became more deeply involved in the wider development community - and have indeed become a developer.

I have to confess that at first it was a bit of a culture shock for someone that had been involved with the traditional IT business for 35+ years, because I just couldn't work out how it actually worked! But it does - and is an intriguing example of collaboration that I will undoubtedly return to in future posts - and it works extremely well especially if you are prepared to contribute very actively yourself.

My view therefore is that this growing movement is certainly not a sideshow - and this view was recently reinforced when a friend recently sent me a link to a paper from a firm of lawyers where the central theme addressed is that opensource:

"has today achieved such a key role in software development that it may begin to enter a level of maturity in which competition law risks could arise".

Far fetched? Or the consequence of a real revolution?


1. See http://www.opensource.org/ for more information on opensource
2. See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ for details on the most common GPL and LGPL software licenses and Creative Commons for the license often used for documentation etc.