Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Open Source - No Free Lunch


One of the comments posted on my recent blog titled “Dogmatic Views on Open Source” ( http://tr.im/lUzh ) comes from Peter B…”open source is good, if you don't have any dough, but: there's no free lunch.” There is a lot of meat in Peter’s statement, yet such a statement is no doubt interpreted differently depending on the perspective of the reader. ”Open source is good”. Really? “If you don’t have any dough,” and you select a free option, and fail to achieve your goals because of a poor technology selection, then you have made an expensive mistake. Open source can be good or bad, whether or not you have any dough, and there is no free lunch, but you may end up with a better solution for your needs, and you may end up saving money, or failing. One must first ask, what are we trying to accomplish, and how ready are we to accomplish it?

Three years ago I needed an information only website, and to set up employees email addresses for an IT Governance start-up I was forming, and this was a bootstrap endeavor. I have never written a line of code in my life, nor set up a network more complicated than plugging a router into the cable box in my den, yet via a Google search I selected a hosting company, created an account, entered my credit card number, selected a few options during the registration process, and with only one call for help and 20 minutes assistance from a friend, I had successfully installed the Linux operating system, the Apache Tomcat web server, MySQL01 database and (this is where I needed 20 minutes help) installed the Drupal content management system. All in the cloud, from my home office, with under an hours’ time spent.

It was not free, but it was only about 35 dollars a month, and it enabled me to get a site up in a matter of minutes, and spend 99% of my time figuring out what our content was going to be. In this example, I was paying for web and email hosting, but I was also paying for Dream Host’s ability to offer a reliable technology stack on which to sit Drupal, which just happened to be open source(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, or, the “LAMP” stack). I am not sure what subscriptions Dream Host may have invested in internally for the technologies they employ, open source or otherwise.

So, open source is good if you don’t have any dough. But what about Weather Channel’s CIO Brian Shield, who recently told me he runs an almost exclusively open source shop. He has dough, for him it is just as much about what he is trying to accomplish, and his web site essentially is his business. Employers may hire technologists for their skills in open source, and if a technologist has contributed to open source projects, then she probably commands even more. I would not be surprised if Brian has such talent working for him. I contend that the largest monetization of open source to date is the total of all “premiums” paid to individual developers for their knowledge and contributions either in support or creation of open source code or in helping their employers leverage open source. I contend it will always be that way. I content this is a good thing. I agree with Peter at least on this point, there is no free lunch.

So if my assumptions are true, why all the investment from angels, VC’s, and top software vendors? Open source creators are often highly motivated and highly competent. These contributors want to put out their best, and others in turn want to prove they too have something to offer, even if that is to prove they are smart enough to “break” or find fault in someone else’s creation. This creates a quality control phenomenon that cannot be reproduced inside a corporation…it is a kind of Darwinian mass collaboration fueled by simple economics and a healthy dose of pride of ownership….a great recipe for quality to be created in the most efficient manner, with an assurance of market demand baked in. These developers simply do not in-mass cook up something no one wants but them. Investors encourage [fund] open source development for one reason, to make money, but they attempt to do so in a variety of ways:

A) Drive hardware sales by building goodwill and exposure, while assuring they help drive the standards for which their products are tuned ( Sun created JAVA, IBM helped found Eclipse ).

B) Build infrastructure around which they wrap commercial service subscriptions ( Redhat funds much of the development on Linux Fedora and Jboss.org to create the open source based commercial operating system “RHEL” and the open source based commercial middleware JBoss).

C) Create business applications for which they can offer hosting and/or integrations, customization and support services ( SugarCRM is open source, and they are now a threat to Salesforce.com )

Who else is motivated to encourage open source development? Governments. One example, and you will hear more about this soon: the United States Government and The Open Source Software Institute (http://www.oss-institute.org/). They have opened up a bunch of old government projects because they simply could no longer afford to support them. If you don’t understand why and how this works, reread the above paragraph…I will likely devote a future blog just to this, for now I offer this from their website.

The Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) is a non-profit (501 (c )(6)) organization comprised of corporate, government and academic representatives whose mission is to promote the development and implementation of open-source software solutions within U.S. federal and state government agencies and academic entities.


So how does this work? IBM creates a somewhat captive audience with Eclipse, or at least they often get a shot at hardware sales. If a company is running Linux chances are very high they are paying either Redhat, or in some cases, Novell SuSe ( sometimes even via Microsoft ) for a commercially supported enterprise ready version of Linux. Companies can use the “free” Fedora” Linux, or the “free” openSuSe”, but for the most part, the “cost” of free in this case in too much risk. Most commercial operations acknowledge that the packaging, testing, patching, 24 x 7 X 365 support, standardization and indemnification they get for a subscription is money well spent, and a good bit cheaper than Sun Solaris (now Oracle) or other commercial alternatives. Ok, Solaris has been free for several years, er…but… Sun hardware is not, and I am pretty sure Solarus runs really well on Sun hardware.

As we travel up the stack, the lines get really blurry, and the decisions more divergent on who adopts, who pays, when, and why. JBoss is the most widely used application server on the planet, ahead of both IBM’s Webshere and Oracles’ WebLogic. It is also arguably the best. So why has Redhat stock, who owns the commercialized version of JBoss, not climbed to the stratosphere as companies continue to adopt JBoss for new projects, or even migrate existing applications to JBoss? Because unlike at the operating system level, consumers are much more apt to “go naked”, and use the “free” JBoss.org version instead of the “enterprise ready commercially supported” JBoss.com version. They don’t see as much risk as at the operating system level, and middleware tends to be stable because developers are much less inclined to change their configuration than operations people are to patch an operating system with the latest fix.

In the BI space the decision may be more of a comparison of bells and whistles, with SAP / Business Object, IBM / Cognos, etc. still having more eye candy and then open source contenders. In databases, more likely the aversion to open source data bases has to do with what executives are willing to lay on the line on an open source database…Oracle is still king here, but look for more and more adoption of alternatives databases co-existing along side of Oracle. I can almost hear Larry’s teeth nashing. Why again did he buy Sun, er a, MySql.

To not support open source vendors may be shortsighted, perhaps even tacky, especially if you are transitioning from a closed source solution, or delving into a project that would otherwise not have been funded. This is a case where if you have the dough, you should pony up. By the way, “going naked” is often “offending” the companies own IT Governance, and opening up the organization to legal risks. Besides, who keeps making Redhat products better? Fedora and JBoss.org contributors. Who pays for the contributor’s effort? Largely it is paid employees of a commercial open source company. If you get a “free dinner coupon”, do you still tip the waiter? I hope so.

On the other hand, many companies have looked at JBoss as an alternative to IBM or Oracle and said, “no thank you,” even after a due diligence tells them it is on par with the incumbent technically. They see the elimination of license costs and the reduction in support / subscription cost as interesting, they are even confident that they could make the move, but what holds them back is operational preparedness, or some soft but sometimes very important advantage to lassie fair. Total cost of ownership must be “total”….so what if we do all this and then our developers lose productivity because they now must work in a new and unfamiliar environment. For some even the slight prospect of this in unacceptable. What is a business partner is not on board with the whole open source thing, and you cause a 10 million dollar ripple to save 1 million dollars. Sales reps often cite the motivation for “C” level technology homeostasis as ...”oh, the IBM rep plays golf with the CIO, that is why they won’t go open source”. Maybe, but what information does the CIO gain for that loyalty? Likely it is something more valuable than the savings he would gain for a whole shift to open source. These forces collectively are why all companies fall somewhere on a close source to open source adoption continuum, with most somewhere in the middle. There is a shift, but there will always be a broad spectrum of adoption rates.

Consider the numerous attempts to make money by building companies around the support of open source projects, which have resulted in the creation of companies such as Pentaho and Jaspersoft in BI, Alfresco in content management, and MySQL ( SUN / Oracle ) and Postgres Plus ( EnterpriseDB ) in the database space. Oracle’s motivations may be around control, but the VC’s who investing in these other companies, and the entrepreneurs who founded them did so to make something great and profit greatly from it. It is not a slam dunk, and they too have found, and as Peter reminds us, “there is no free lunch”.


Your comments below are appreciated.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Dogmatic views on Open Source


Why begin a blog named "Pragmatic Enterprise Open Source" with an entry starting with the word dogmatic?

Since I was first introduced to the notion of open source software in the late 1990's I have become increasingly intrigued by opinions on both ends of the spectrum relative to open source, and bewildered by the dogmatism and sometimes utter irrationality with which holders of these wildly divergent opinions opine, especially when they come from leaders in enterprises with otherwise nearly identical business models.

"From which well doth he drink his kool-aide"? Sometimes the answer is obvious, others times, indiscernible. As is the case in political movements, we run the risk that the shouts of zealot's and detractors at the fringe might drown out the mass of sane and often better informed yet quieter voices in the middle. While this is my blog, I hope that if you stumble upon it and are so moved you will post a comment telling me "how wrong you are", or better yet how, "you have it almost right, but missed such and such important element."

There are many thousands of blogs, wikis, and forums that delve into the bowels of the most prolific as well as the most obscure open source projects, and in the time it took me to right this, likely another novel sized body of text on this immense subject was spawned. If you have contributed code to an open source project, and don't know what a P/L is, then I apologize, I have wasted your valuable time, and now is a good time for your to throw it in reverse and head back to your favorite development environment or aforementioned social posting site. By the way, thank you for your work!

So let's start with enterprise open source's own 800 pound gorilla.
Walk into the front lobby of Redhat/JBoss Headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia and you will be greeted by a lovely lady over whose head is posted a very large indelibly inscribed quote attributed to Mohandas Gandhi..."First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win". Judging by the size of Redhat ( ~$650 M 2008 revenue) and the several years running 30+% year over year growth, there have already clearly been some "winners", not the least of whom are the crew that grew JBoss from an idea to a sale to Redhat for $360 million in just a few short years. Redhat's current CEO left a position as COO of Delta Airlines where it is reported his 2007 earnings topped $8 million. Open source has grown up, or at least eight or ten companies have built businesses around supporting these ready for the enterprise code bases, now available packaged similarly to proprietary offerings with which they compete, sans the initial licenses costs and overhead associated with paying for 458 foot private yachts and decommissioned fighter jets. More power to Larry Ellison, but it is nice to have a choice sometimes.

The time for intellectually honest debate about the commercial viability of several enterprise ready fully supported open source products is over. If you do not agree, please don't take my word for it, but do remove your head from the sand and call the CIO down the street who is likely running circles around you. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of great reasons to run a pure Microsoft shop, or to heavily leverage IBM. But if you are running significant web applications, you are probably already using open source and are just unaware of it. If this is the case then you are likely running unsupported product, which in turn may be in violation of your own IT Governance. The good news is that there is likely someone out there who will take your money in exchange for support and indemnification of these rogue technologies, and they will do so at a fraction of the cost for proprietary products, and the quality of support will likely be as good or better than what you would get from similar closed code providers.


Today open source is in the enterprise in a pretty big way, and while the above quote from Gandhi accurately describes the "you've come a long way, baby" progress of the open source movement, it is flawed in that it suggests an end game. Open source is just an attribute, an attribute that now is affixed to products owned by and / or supported by some of the largest companies in the world, including Oracle, with its purchase of Sun / MySQL. IBM was a founder of the Eclipse Foundation, and has recently formed an even stronger relationship with EnterpriseDB, a professionally supported enterprise open source alternative to Oracle database.

Ellison may have ignored, then laughed, but he is now in fight mode, a fight he will take to his grave, which will most assuredly include open source spoils and pillage.

So save your dogma for politics, open source is in the enterprise, but so is Larry, Gates, and the rest of the usual suspects, and they have inextricably entered the game. The sourceforge.net open source repository hosts over 180,000 open source projects, with 1.9 million registered users, and 28 million annual visitors to the site. Translation...there will continue to be an increasing flow of open source projects that bubble up, harden, and become enterprise ready. The genie is out of the bottle. Rub it right and it may grant you a wish or two.

Open source is no longer just languages like PERL, Java, and Ruby, and it is no longer even just operating systems like Linux and its many flavors, or even limited to middleware. There are now viable options for many business needs that reach up the stack all the way to CRM, business intelligence, etc. There is even a huge amount of open content in education and entertainment. The wildly popular band RadioHead put a recent album on sale on-line for "free", and suggested buyers pay what they thought it was worth. The fans spoke with their pocketbooks and paid an average of 8 dollars for the download, many paying zero, and others paying much more. While RadioHeads songs are not "code", and they are not registered with Apache or GNU ( open source licensing modes ) the monetization parallels are helpful in understanding the phenomenon of open source, and in explaining why on earth someone would "give away" their IP, or even their "help" to a stranger in support of something neither of them owns.

At the level of the developer it is largely about being a part of something bigger than you, that you can be a part of...using open source it is truly a part of practicing your craft. I use this "product" because I can see it, there are no secrets, and if I want to bad enough, and I am good enough, I can even change and build upon it. Literally millions do. It is this mass participation that has made some open source products simply the best in class, regardless of how they are licensed. Most well informed technologists would put no peer next to Linux.

At the level of the CIO, she can say, I want to use these three open source products at the platform level, but I only want to buy support for those two, on top of which I will place my custom built applications, and several others I purchased from IBM and SAP, and I am going to use Oracle data base for some applications, Mysql, for some, and Postgres Plus for still others. I am running SAP / Business Objects for some of our business intelligence needs, and Pentaho or JasperSoft for still others. Maybe I will migrate my content management from Documentum to opensource contender Alfresco. For CRM, I could use Oracle on site, Salesforce.com in the cloud, or open source "SugarCRM" either hosted internally, or pay for a Saas version.

The quiet, technology agnostic open source pragmatist is the winner of this war, but that does not assure he won't be gassing up Larry's boat for his next Mediterranean cruise . What say you?