It all depends on what the meaning of open source is - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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April 08, 2008
It all depends on what the meaning of open source is

In recent posts on this blog and across the blogosphere, there is much discussion about the increasing penetration of open source into enterprises. The illustration above, from a year-end open source software (OSS) report available here on ebizQ, explains the three different strains of open source, and why, when analysts talk about open source taking over the world, it all depends on what the meaning of open source is. The illustration uses middleware as examples but a similar timeline of open source history can be drawn with most types of infrastructure software as examples.

Open source has sort of been around since the beginning of the information technology (IT) industry. Of course that didn't really matter 50 years ago because most software was also bundled with, leased with and only ran on the hardware it came with. After IBM was forced to unbundle its software by a consent agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice around 1970 (sound familiar all you twenty-something Microbashers), a split in software terms and conditions (Ts&Cs) became pronounced. There were academic developments (on the right of the chart) with one set of Ts&Cs while most software remained effectively bundled (left hand side) even though it was priced and licensed separately. The GNU utilities are an example of the former. In the middle, independent software vendors (ISVs), a new type of company, created software products by writing their own middleware and kernels (e.g., SAP ABAP and Basis) in order to more easily port their software from one closed platform to another. (Many other ISVs, most of whose names are long forgotten, wrote their software exclusively for one platform such as the System/3, AS/400, or NetWare.)

Then the left and right were joined (literally and figuratively) by a third strain of products that are released with some open source characteristics but under Ts&Cs that do not require that any software that uses it also be redistributable or its source opened (the best example being the original Apache). This means the products can be used and forked and otherwise played with by anyone in a way similar to GNU General Public License (GPL) products. But it also means that the new strain of OSS products can be built into closed products (which can't be played with). Both strains can be used to build a maintenance support and professional IT services business exactly the same as the original ISVs have run for 30 years. Sometimes these are closed source products that have the code quite "embedded" (e.g., Apache in vanilla WebSphere AS since the mid 1990s) and sometimes the products are simply an "enterprise edition" of the community project (e.g., WebSphere's version of Apache Gluecode).

From a market analysis perspective, in order to determine how OSS might "change the market," the major question is what strain of open source are we talking about.
1. If Academic/GNU/GPL/community-edition type software can be used effectively by enterprises without accompanying service (for example, as Red Hat discovered with JBoss, some of this software doesn't require a lot of maintenance), enterprise spending on IT will actually contract (at least comparing apples to apples) and it can be truly said that open source has taken over enterprises.
2. If it turns out that the community edition strain of OSS requires as much support as the more traditional strain of commercial software, so that enterprises typically buy the "enterprise edition," the IT market will evolve the same as it has for the last 30 years. The major difference will be that today IT vendors recognize about 33% of your payments to them as licenses, whereas -- if scenario 2 is the case -- they will recognize all your payments as services revenues. You'll still pay the same.

Separately I will look at the penetration of open source into cloud computing.