BANGALORE, INDIA: Today, open source beyond Linux, is proving itself to be a tremendously successful business model. Secure, reliable, flexible Linux and open source software is rapidly complementing commercial software in customer engagements that include standards-based hardware platforms, software, and services.

In an exclusive with CIOL, Dr. Guruduth Banavar, Director, IBM India Research Laboratory highlights on IBM’s role to the open source community along with India’s adoption and trends of the industry. Excerpts:

CIOL: How does IBM's approach to open source help enhance the benefits and mitigate the challenges of open source for its customers and business partners?

Dr. Guruduth Banavar: Open source is a part of the wider open computing movement, along with open standards and open architecture. Open source can help accelerate open standards, and together they enable integration and flexibility, benefit customers and business partners and avoid vendor lock-in. Today, customers using supercomputers, to gaming, to mobile phones all benefit from the low cost of ownership, security, and reliability of Linux and open source software running on IBM hardware and server platforms.

CIOL: How actively does IBM contribute to the number of open source communities and in what ways?

Dr. G.B: IBM is the largest single contributor to Open Source community projects overall with involvement in more than 150 open source projects including about 20 with Apache. IBM has over 600 developers working full time on Linux and open source and has sponsored donations to industry organizations like Eclipse, Apache and Mozilla.

CIOL: What is IBM’s support for open source across software, hardware and services?

Dr. G.B: IBM standardized a Web technology called Ajax by bringing together dozens of tech titans to form the Open Ajax initiative with Eclipse. IBM donated a portion of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) to the open source Eclipse Foundation. The company donated the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), an advanced search capability, to open source community.

Recently, IBM joined eight storage vendors to form an open source organization, Aperi, to drive standards in storage. IBM also donated accessibility technology to Mozilla to make the Firefox browser easier to use for the elderly and people with disabilities. The company contributed 30 open source technologies to SourceForge.net, a leading online host of open source technologies.

What is significant is that IBM donated 500 patents from across its portfolio to the open source community. The company is a member of the Linux Foundation. IBM is also a member of the OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance), an organization dedicated to promoting open solutions for office document formats, including text, presentation and spreadsheet formats. ODF is supported by two dozen open source and proprietary electronic documents.

IBM joined the Berkman Center of Internet and Society, Novell, and key security and industry standards groups to support "Project Higgins," an initiative to give consumers more control over online personal identity   information. In addition, IBM opened the ecosystem around POWER processors and Blade systems through an open source hardware approach with Power.org and Blade.org. The company introduced Open Source Services to identify and leverage new services opportunities around open source software for IBM Global Services.

CIOL: How has IBM embraced both the concept and the reality of open-source software (OSS)?

Dr. G.B: The late 1990s were key open source years and our strategic goals for open source have remained consistent. 

Dr. G.B: IBM’s Open Source Goals are to innovate, contribute, enhance, and grow:

Innovation: By harnessing and fuelling the energy and innovation of Open Source communities, for example, through the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, Xen virtualization, and the Open Healthcare Framework.

Contribution: By becoming a strategic player in Open Source communities, both as a contributor and consumer of technology, for example, through Apache Tuscany, Eclipse Aperi, and Mozilla Firefox.

Enhancement: By capturing, focusing and translating Open Source innovation into value for our customers, for example, through Lotus Expeditor, Rational Elite Support for Eclipse, and OmniFind Yahoo! Edition.

Growth: By leveraging Open Source to gain new users, enter new markets, and expand business opportunities, for example, through the Eclipse ecosystem and WebSphere Application Server Community Edition.

CIOL: At what speed is open source maturing today in the various industries?

Dr. G.B: Some industries such as education and healthcare will continue to create open source applications that work specifically within their domains. For example, in education, you have Sakai and Moodle, and in healthcare, for instance, you have the Open Healthcare Framework (OHF) project.

The next five years or so will be interesting in the area of open source industry apps. It will be a "do or die" period, we will see significant progress in creating open source applications for the non-public sector, or proprietary applications will maintain their dominance in the very long term.

CIOL: Being open source, do you feel that security is, more or less vulnerable?

Dr. G.B: In some respects, open source is just as secure as proprietary software. For example, witness the numerous vulnerabilities inherent in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, a proprietary product. In contrast, Firebox, an open source browser, is infinitely more secure. We can attribute this phenomenon to the fact that there are many smart people in the open source community, who can lend their support and good idea at a much faster pace than with more closed, limited organizations. Open source, in some respects, is more adaptable.

CIOL: What would a successful open-source movement mean to IBM's software business?

Dr. G.B: Clearly, open source has been very good for IBM's software business. It is a good way to introduce businesses to IBM portfolio. Many businesses start with our open source offerings, and then migrate to our commercial offerings as their needs become more complex. Linux fills important niches, and proprietary software does so as well. It is not a zero-sum game.

Our software businesses have enjoyed tremendous growth during the very years that Linux has grown. If you compare our revenue when Linux first became popular, and where our revenue is today, you will find that our revenue has more than doubled, to more than $20 billion. Therefore, it has been very good for us.

CIOL: Can you give us more details on the Open Source Steering Committee (OSSC)?

Dr. G.B: The Open Source Steering Committee, OSSC, is responsible for IBM's strategic policy supporting open source utilization and direction. It is comprised of IBM executives responsible for overseeing IBM's engagement in Open Source Software (OSS) activities and providing guidance on more complex open-source matters within IBM. Days of the lone inventor in a garage are long gone. The nature of innovation is changing, becoming open, collaborative, global, and multidisciplinary. Global adoption  of the Internet, as well as pervasive technologies based on open standards, have stripped away the traditional barriers to innovation; such as proximity of natural resources, geographic constraints, and access to both information and insight.

Dr. G.B:

Today, governments and businesses across the globe and in emerging economies like India are increasingly embracing open computing, open standards, and some open source projects because they provide higher value than the alternatives. IBM has pledged many patents to open source, open standards and software interoperability to stimulate innovation.

Acceptance of open standards is helping governments achieve their goal of truly bridging the digital divide and bringing Information Technology to citizens by deploying open, accessible standards, not proprietary software. Indian enterprises have set up their own teams to evaluate OSS benefits, and have seen benefits such as security, endurance of open standard documents, elimination of dependence on foreign software and freedom to customize and develop.

Although Open Source platform has been around for quite some time, its advantages over proprietary software are now coming into notice. This was due to hesitance on the part of institutions - which in turn was due to reasons like no proper awareness regarding OSS, lack of an open-source policy, and concerns over compliance, and licensing, and intellectual property or ownership.

It is predicted that by 2012, 75 percent of software products will have embedded open-source software. In fact, according to our estimates the growth of Linux operating system is now seen at more that 100 percent.

CIOL:  Are you seeing any trend about the industry?

Dr. G.B: Open source technologies have spawned an ecosystem of developers building applications based on open architectures enabling IT systems to be truly interoperable. In today's hybrid environment where open source and private source software coexist and complement each other, we may see users take a pragmatic business driven approach that exploits open innovation and open communities that are part of the larger open source ecosystem.

Further, IBM believes there are a number of compelling factors, which will propel significant initiatives in open source. For instance, one of the most significant factors would be in solving environmental, ecological and energy-saving issues. This would go beyond the datacenter where Linux is helping to reduce energy consumption through server consolidation, virtualization, load balancing and more efficient resources management.

Here, we are talking about things like clever, innovative open source applications to make homes, cars, people and so on more energy efficient.