Open Source Acceptance

Open Source Acceptance in the Data Center

The debate on whether to implement software Proprietary or Open Source software (OSS) is currently a hotly competitive issue. Today, the software world is divided into proprietary, such as Microsoft Windows, and open source philosophies such as Linux. Linux is a modernized derivative of UNIX. Proprietary software is that which is sold by a vendor to a consumer in which the vendor holds all copyrights and does not share its source code, right to copy, and modify or study its product. In contrast, Open Source software is distributed freely or at a low cost as well as making its source code publicly available. Open source software generally refers to a class of software where the complete, buildable source code is provided and is freely distributable without restrictions or non-disclosure agreements. (Open Source Initiative, 2003)The absolute defining characteristics of Open Source software not only includes the source code, but also its complied form; it also calls for free distribution, free licensing, used by any one for any purpose, and must not be specific to any particular product or technology or style of interface. (Xandros, 2003) OSS tends to have the ability to be more stabile than offerings from than individual proprietors, mostly because of the large number of software authors and beta testers.

Open Source software has many advantages over software vendors. (Cyber, 2003) OSS allows for reduced hardware costs. With the never ending of consolidation and cost cutting, there will be no need to always need to upgrade hardware; the need to upgrade for new software will wane. Legacy solutions will become a thing of the past, so problems of extracting data from older systems and having to fix bugs which are now deprecated will eventually dissipate. And there is also the flexibility of changing the OSS to fit a particular need. Since OSS shares its source code, such changes are not a major consequence. There is also a degree for nationalization when using OSS, reason being is that the software is developed at home and there is no need to import software from other countries. Unfortunately, counting against OSS are billions of dollars that are not contributed into its development and testing, such as some vendor software, changing to an unfriendly to user interface is not going to be very popular with many employees, additionally OSS do not have any marketing budget so it is difficult to spread the word. (Peeling & Satchell 2001) But the future tends to favor OSS, it is estimated that within the next five years that OSS infrastructure products will encapsulate 50 percent of the markets volume.

There are many software proprietors that have been adopting the Open Source software model for some of their products, mostly middleware. Some of these notable companies: IBM, SAP, HP, and Apple have come to realize that it is important to offer such a portfolio. Others have gone exclusively to an open source model, such as; Redhat, Ximian, and Caldera. These open source offerings must compete with such offerings from Sun Solaris, IBM AIX with UNIX, Microsoft Windows, plus database ware from Oracle and SAP, and web servers from BEA and Microsoft IIS. (Shankland, 2002) These corporate giants develop and distribute software infrastructure systems, encompassing operating systems, databases, web servers, and other major components that enable software to run.

There has been a growing trend, bucking even UNIX based OS Solaris to implementations of Linux using Intel hardware. The most notable revelation of this process is the Amazon.com switch from Solaris to Intel based Linux. The bottom line for most corporations, world wide, is cutting costs and gaining a competitive advantage. Amazon saw advantages ranging from cutting cost, to being able to have more freedom choosing software to run on their systems. (Barker, 2003)In fact they reduced their cost of technology and content as a percentage of sales from 7.2 per cent to 4.2 per cent last year. Amazon has moved from mostly Sun systems running Solaris to Intel running Linux. Running on Intel instead of Sun's proprietary RISC architecture opens up new choices for Amazon's IT managers. Reason being is that Pentium servers are available in all sizes, shapes and makes, Sun servers are not. So for Amazon it was worth switching to Linux from Solaris for the cost benefits. The dependability aspect may fall short of Solaris, but the opportunity of flexibility and cost efficiency is too good to pass up. And the results of organizations moving to Linux have prompted Sun to challenge Linux. The first move Sun made was to make Solaris 9 not compatible with Intel x86. (Lemos, 2002)Their second move was to give its compatibility with Intel as well as embrace Linux such had HP, Dell, Oracle, Computer Associates, BEA, BMC, Borland, Check Point, Novell, Veritas already had.

The Windows family of operating systems tends to be geared more towards the home user, the small business, and the medium business. Microsoft truly aspires to compete with large businesses, but finds itself more in tuned towards the smaller users, than the super users. Though Windows is by far the most used operating system in the world, they also are feeling the impact of the OSS revolution.

Much of the non-technical world has developed a dependency for Windows based software and operating systems. Many individuals in the scientific community, such as programmers, scientists, and engineers make UNIX based operating systems and open source software their choice in a development environment. The basic users' differences between the Windows environment and the UNIX based environment (i.e. Solaris, Linux) are that Windows caters to the non-super user where the UNIX type environment caters to the super user. It is an industry necessity that non-super users use a simple, easy to learn, ergonomically friendly, consistent layout for which they can work with. In the super user's world, the user doesn't need cute stuff or any type of graphic user interface; in fact many programmers despise anything in that category. They need something that is not only multitasking, but also multiprogramming; that is dependable and high performing. Windows NT compared against an industry of Open Source software shows that, (Peeling & Satchell 2001) insurance costs are 25% higher safe guarding against disaster than OSS or other proprietary software applications. Also, reasons that Windows are susceptible to attach are from both a social reasoning and for technical reasons, respectively. Virus writers go after Windows because it is very prevalent as well as personal feelings towards Microsoft as a corporation. For a virus to spread, the virus must infect more than one system, with Windows being so prevalent its ubiquity makes it an easy target. Also with the design developments with window, MS Word macros, Outlook Express attachments, and the lack of robustness of its write protection priorities of its file systems has led to hideous amounts of attacks. (Peeling & Satchell 2001) To substantiate this claim as of 2001, Windows has had over 60,000 viruses written for it. There have been about around forty written for Macintosh and about the same for Linux, and five for UNIX. Most of these viruses are not very serious, but several hundred have caused substantial widespread damage; none of the Linux or UNIX viruses ever became widespread.

Recent developments involving China and India have put the debate over open source acceptance versus the traditional software vendors' offerings. China said that it would be best for its country that they implement OSS, preferably Linux, as their operating system needs. The feeling is that Chinese officials refer the usage of software with open source codes, over Microsoft, to ensure that software guarding sensitive state information and so networks cannot be tampered with easily. But also the Chinese government will be rewarded with a sense of nationalism towards this future product, as well as the lack of necessity to depend on expense imports. This would not delete the position of small, medium and personal usage of Windows type products, but would eventually safe guard government data but also develop another industry in this bustling country. (Reuters, 2003) China, along with South Korea and Japan had agreed in September 2003 to collaborate on building a new computer operating system as an alternative to Windows. Japanese officials also suggested they also would likely build an open-source system such as Linux.

The attitudes in India are a bit different from eastern Asian. India has agreed with the Indian government to authorize Windows as the country's operating system. The agreement is that Microsoft would give Indian government Microsoft software for free, and then eventually begin charging for licensing.

My own opinion borders on that of bias, but also comes from the perspective of an economist and that of a computer scientist. A fair perspective would be based on both business and computer science because both depend on the other and both is important to individuals in each of the respected sectors. It is unfair for Microsoft to make public individuals and private organizations depend on their operating system, as well as much of their software. Considering it would probably take an Indian individual, much of a year of income just to purchase a license to use a Microsoft operating system. But on the other hand, it is unfair for a company such as Red Hat to freely distribute Linux. Packaging it with their servers, such as IBM and others do, is fair commerce because there is a premium price accompanying it. But to just give away a valuable and piece of operating system software without any cost borders on a monopoly. The reason being is that once corporate users begin to depend on Linux and Apache, there will be a smaller demand for Windows. And what that means is that Microsoft will lose value and eventually will need to cut jobs and look for new technologies to invest in. But as in the case of India, Microsoft is trying very hard to get the country "addicted" to Microsoft technologies, to keep others from competing; in the economic terms this is referred as dumping. A famous example of this is the influx of Asian automakers into North America. The strongest companies sold a decent product at a much lower than industry price or even that of their home markets for the sole purpose of gaining auto share, but more importantly acceptance and demand. So the losers were the North American automakers as well as the public, because millions of jobs were lost and since there were no comparable jobs to replace the lost; the macro economic standard of living was demonetarized. Though in the long run, the consumer eventually benefited from such strong competition, because competition brings innovation and innovation brings a better product to the public. So to me there are two monopolistic practices taking place at once, one making money the other in the future; and both battling to the end. So in the cases of India and eastern Asia, these monopolistic activities have "flip flopped." To me, both of these situations in Asia are very unsettling. An analogy would be to compare there actions to those of cigarette companies giving free samples to college students. In both scenarios the objective is to encourage addiction and to use that particular brand. But the intentions of Open Source software and Microsoft are different; one is to create a better and more robust product, while the other is to gain more fortune and more dominance.

In conclusion, this topic could have included many other manufacturers with similar comparisons, but the issues are similar for most. The need to emphasize comparisons of the top players was more imperative than briefly summarizing individual proprietors based on their products from different types of markets versus Open Source software. As the industry gains confidence in OSS, most notably Linux, the more consideration they receive. The best thing for IT managers is now they have a new option, when the others don't meet their criteria. And this new option should develop into stronger products and lenient pricing towards the future. There definitely is Open Source Acceptance in the data center as well as some other aspects of Information Technology. As long as monopolistic activities are held in check and enterprise is allowed to flourish, then Open Source software will definitely contribute to the computing industry as a whole.

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