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The hype phase is over; now Linux can move forward
(The author is president of Raven Bear
Systems
Corporation, a Vancouver, B.C., firm
specializing
in data analysis tools for business.)
In the last few months there has been
a maturing
in the understanding of Open Source
Software
(OSS). The initial hype over Linux,
mainly
stock market caused, made a dent in
the momentum
of OSS. From a developer community
perspective,
there definitely has been an increase
in
the number of participants but there
has
been relatively little penetration
in the
corporate world.
And for Open Source to be anything but a periphery movement, there need to be more corporate users using it for critical tasks -- from servers to applications to desktops.
We are in the midst of porting our products towards being 100% open source compliant -- i.e. ing out all propriety dependent software apps and platforms requirements. We have seen a strong uptake in the Small-to-Medium Enterprises for open source software -- now that the misunderstanding of the Linux hype is subsiding.
Initially the challenges we faced were two fold -- internally from investors who were wary of "opening everything." And from clients who felt that their infrastructure would be exposed with freely downloaded code and wanted free upgrades for eternity. Once this mountain (or molehill) was surmounted, the normal issues in selling software could be discussed.
The tight coupling of Microsoft technologies accrues punitive cost -- that aggressively and progressively cuts into the ROI despite low front-end employee training. The new .NET framework specified by Microsoft will reduce the coupling, once the developer community has begun to define the potential of web services. This will allow the use of more disparate vendor applications, more easily, in companies. The major impetuses towards Open Source among corporate users are the prohibitive upfront and licensing costs of vendor-propriety apps. These are increasing the length of software sales cycles and reluctance to fractionally upgrade.
Vendors are pricing themselves out of the market with complicated licensing agreements, bloated software, expensive support service and constant upgrades. A "connected company" can gain efficiency and increase productivity -- but not if the connecting tools are an expensive deterrent. The Small-to-Medium enterprises, having less than $100 Million annual revenues, are the ones that are feeling the most pain now and are looking for alternative IT solutions. These are companies that, until now, mainly have Microsoft running the desktops and a combination of Microsoft and Oracle on the backend.
The pincer movement of upgrade fatigue and latency of sales cycles will also force the larger software companies to be friendlier to open source. However there will more attempts to try to tweak OSS to make it vendor dependent.
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Posted 1 April 2002