Open source adoption moving up the stack

BANGALORE, INDIA: Open source is a relevant model regardless of the type of software that you are building. Its adoption started lower in the stack and slowly moving up the stack now. It is only at the second half of this decade that we got more mature products backed by viable vendors in the application stage.

Dominic Sartorio, president of the Open Solutions Alliance, a non-profit consortium focusing on the interoperability and adoption of open source solutions said, “Today, we are seeing many open source solutions in general. Open source started as a phenomenon where developers collaborated and we saw developers creating mature products that are by developers, for developers, and its success is now extending to other domains today. We can see acceleration in the application stage due to open source licensing security and maturity.” He was speaking at the Open Source Software (OSS) Roundtable on ebizQ recently. 

Open Source adoption today

Open source application adoption is seeing an across the board phenomenon in reference to its acceptance across the industry today. It is moving up the stack with minor differences between categories. Open Source and web infrastructure layers, which are in the initial level, are moving up the stack. The server side in particular is where the industry is adopting at a higher pace. 

“Solutions of the mid market focus seem to get the initial  attraction of solutions like CRM and we see bigger enterprise getting more comfortable with open source solutions for enterprises like ERP getting more adoption recently,” said Dominic.

People have their own preferences in choosing a platform. Some will prefer Linux or Solaris and there are others who do not care and use Jboss, Glassfish, and Windows or for that matter IBM AIX or HP-UX.  Each platform or category has its own standard evaluation criteria that would apply. What a user would typically look for will be functionality, robustly, performance and reliability, the upfront cost and the services available. This fundamentally applies in the close community, which is also very much applicable in the open source arena as well. 

Ross Altman, CTO, SOA and Business Integration, Sun Microsystems said: “What is great is that now we have competition in many of these categories. People do have the opportunities to decide among different worldviews on what an open source operating system might look like and what an open source application server might look like. Therefore, if you do believe that, a competitive environment makes people do their best; this is all very good for us. All we need to do is take the skill set that we have been applying in the past 20 years and we apply it today in the open source options.”

A recent study “Linux Foundation/IDC Ecosystem Report” conducted by Linux and IDC revealed that Linux is everywhere and it is the underlying component for any stack. The report shows that there is a still wide selection of components, which make up any kind of technical solution. There is also an increase not only in usage of open source component above that layer but also a much larger commercial application ecosystem on top of Linux and a lot more application vendors are supporting their applications on Linux to make sure it runs effectively on that platform.

“However, we are seeing some consolidation in the market, which is important to understand because people make technology persisting decisions or usage decisions based on an explicit features contract,’ said Jim Zemlin, executive director, Linux Foundation. “In other words, if you are making a SOA decision you will have to support that technology for 7-8 years and it is becoming increasingly clearer to most end users that the world is consolidating on multiple layers of the stack. In particular, on the platform layer Linux is becoming one of the dominant super side platforms out there along with other growth platforms such as MS Windows.”

“Growth rates were increasing and what we are really seeing is Linux truly consolidating across workloads within enterprises where it was a few years ago traditionally an edge of the network type of infrastructure component and now its really the core underlying infrastructure of running mission critical ERP systems and large transactional systems trading applications and so forth. That is where we seeing much larger growth within the type of workloads rather than the type of industry we are seeing growth across different types of industry,” added Jim.

How secure is Open source?

Commenting on the recent report about the security of open source software done by Fortify Software, Ross said: “There are people who think that having close software; the bad people cannot see the source is an advantage. This belief is dismissing today with open source.”

There are two different types of security issues that are relevant today and in which Open source has an edge: One is a Trojan horse code that might be embedded in a piece of software. It is intuitive for us to think that it is a lot harder to hide some bug away in an open source project than in a close source project. Hence, this is one type of security exploit where we are going to have open source as being more secure. 

The other type of security issue is the openness of the software to various types of hacks that would cause buffer overflows etc. All this comes down to how well the software was written. If other people can view the written software there is a greater possibility to have better written software especially if the community is vibrant and there are a lot of contributors and many people to review the code that is being contributed. Moreover, there are likely to be fewer instances where you have bugs or errors that are left in the code and no one notices them.

“I hesitate to say in a blanket statement that all Open source software is going to be more secure that closed software, which is a statement that is a little difficult to defend. However, if there is a very active community then, I think that is a defensible statement,” added Ross Altman, CTO, SOA and Business Integration, Sun Microsystems.

“I think in general all software will have some security issues and I do not think any class of software is inherently more or less secure. One advantage that Open Source has is that not only do bad people see the software or the code but the good person sees it too and if you have any faith in human nature there are more good people than bad people out in the world. I think numbers clear this out. Whenever there are, vulnerabilities found in an Open Source project the community would tend to provide fixes faster,” said Dominic.

Trends of the industry

“Companies that are coming into being more established areas where there is already a lot of open source participation seem to have an easier time of attracting developers. For a new open source company, as you go higher up the stack where open source projects are newer, it will have a harder time. It needs to put in more energy in developing a community, soliciting inputs from people outside their company.

"However, on the other hand a new application vendor will be able to get a lot of contribution. Those contributions can be very significant in a business way. The vendor can get business experts contributing, end users who are themselves business knowledgeable contributing as well. Therefore, the application vendor can get greater opportunity there for companies to add compelling business features for competitors and for competitive differentiation as well. However, to get to that point can be frequently harder because it is a newer area and there have not been a lot of open source involvement in the past,” said Dominic.

"We are not at a point where open source has become a non-issue. However, it opens the door for more capabilities potential to download software without having to go through a rigorous, laborious contracting process. The ability to have a safer more secure software, more capabilities added to the software, and the capabilities that the individual vendor may not offer because they don’t have the expertise and don’t have the time and it is not a an area of focus for them. 

“We certainly have made progress in the past 5 years than we did in the previous 5 years. There are still people who are a little bit behind the time and still worry about who is going to support it and they do not want their people mucking around with the source code, worried about security, and worried about identification. Of course, many vendors who support Open Source products and provide enterprise versions of the product address all those things or they provide support for the open source versions and the various models there,” said Ross.

One great feature about open source is that there is no one-business model and no one-development model. It is a range of development and business models that have evolved. People have choices. The many communities and products not only compete for the interest of contributors but also provide more functionality because competition is good and competition is healthy.