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Opening the source is all the rage these days and people refer to OS as something akin to a mantra. Perhaps a silver bullet is finally in sight, they think. Well it is important to understand that technology serves business. While this might seem obvious, more often than not it is forgotten in the heat and dust of new technology innovations. There are a lot of technologies that are built without necessarily getting a business perspective: the original EJB model is a case in point, as is the earlier and continuing hype surrounding SOA.
So what is the business perspective: well if you are a CIO of any sized organization, the biggest issue facing you in the current economic climate is to cut down on bottom line costs. IT is a cost center for many organizations whose core business is not software, and the pressure is to cut costs. It is unfortunate that one of the silver bullets proposed for cutting these IT Bottom line costs is offshore outsourcing, but that is the topic for another blog entry :-)
Anyway, adopting Open Source technologies is considered by many CIOs as a way of reducing the bottom line pressure, but many of them make the leap without necessarily thinking things through. For example, there is the usual and common misunderstanding of the F in F/OSS. That can be fairly easily explained away and hopefully by now the realization has dawned amongst people that there are no free lunches.
But the greater problem is that people think that somehow having access to the source is good. They have no clear notion of why this is good. But let us look at this once again from the CIO perspective: let us say that the advice is to go in for an Application Server product, because it is Open Source and the organization gets complete license free (or rather restrictive license free) access to the code. Now that by itself cannot be good for the CIO, because having millions of lines of Middleware code lying around in his organization is not exactly of any help.
These code bases are developed by a meritocracy and is normally of the highest quality. In a typical organization as described above, you wont find such programmers. Or even if they are around they are probably busy solving a business related problem such as reporting services creation, single sign-on establishment, portal creation and so on. No one is really available to analyze this code base which the company has obtained access to, and further, there is no one with the skills to develop a patch if the need arises. Invariably the request has to be fielded by a support group that will attend to the request based on their other work load.
In this context it really makes no difference to our beleagured CIO, from a bottom line perspective, whether he has a closed source product or an Open Source one. His organization is just not meant to work on middleware or Operating System code. So adopting an OS solution just because of the Source doesnt make sense for businesses. The source benefits many other developer communities but not your typical IT organization.
Thus a simple licensing model that applies irrespective of whether the product is open source or closed source is the greatest benefit to the CIO organization. The licensing model should have the elements of Professional Open Source as espoused by JBoss and also by Sun with its Sun Application Server subscriptions. That is and should be the differntiating factor in a product choice, especially in the middleware, Operating System and allied areas. Unfortunately today, the cool-aid seems to be overflowing in the Source area and nothing is being said about licensing schemes.
Sometimes the availability of source can be a curse rather than a blessing for a CIO.
