Penguins have been getting a lot of press recently. In the cinema, audiences viewing Luc Jacquet's March of the Penguins have been enthralled by the annual breeding cycle of emperor penguins in Antarctica. Every fall, thousands of penguins migrate 70 miles overland to their breeding grounds, choose mates and produce an egg.
IT departments worldwide have experienced a similar, if less dramatic, migration of penguin-branded and penguin-related software into their domains. That Linux, as well as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), is in widespread use is not news. What is news? After having firmly established itself in infrastructure software, the penguinistas are now poised to make another 70-mile migration—into enterprise application territory.
Open source software is often first used in the enterprise in low-visibility roles. Because it's free, it doesn't appear on the bean counters' radar, and because it's distributed with source code, it's infinitely customizable. As FOSS becomes increasingly visible—particularly in the IT departments of universities and colleges open source will slowly but inexorably establish itself in the for-profit sector. What's driving that transformation?
Unlike the for-profit sector, where protecting the secrets of application systems can provide a competitive advantage, cooperation and collaboration are pushing higher education into the forefront of deploying open source-based enterprise applications. In "Values of Community Source Development" in the September 2004 issue of Syllabus, a magazine that focuses on technology in higher education, Lois Brooks, director of academic computing at Stanford University, writes: "The structure and beliefs of the open source community are increasingly present in higher education. In recent years, a trend toward community-based projects has emerged, where institutions pool their talent and resources to develop products." Brooks goes on to show how Eric Raymond's "cathedral" and "bazaar" are merging into a hybrid model. The problems of the cathedral model are well known, but the bazaar model has its own difficulties; as Brooks explains, "It is not likely that our institutions are willing to bet the next release of a mission-critical system on the goodwill of people we only know by screen names."
A possible solution can be found in the hybrid model, which Brooks calls community source. This centers around the collaboration of institutions with similar goals (with commercial partners providing product support as needed), and encourages its members to "be more accepting of things 'not invented here' and to think more strategically about the build/buy/adopt argument."
Fortunately, most recent computer science graduates have extensive exposure to open source software. But familiarity is not in itself a sufficient condition for a successful project outcome. Several new for-profit organizations, recognizing the additional support open source software requires, have appeared on the scene.
For example, how does an IT department with limited research and testing resources determine which FOSS packages are ready for enterprise deployment? SpikeSource has been organized to test and certify such software. SpikeSource has also joined O'Reilly & Associates to develop CodeZoo, a site dedicated to helping developers find good code components quickly. Carnegie Mellon's West Coast Campus, home of the new Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI), recently held a conference to provide guidance in evaluating, adopting, licensing, using and supporting open source software. CodeZoo and COSI have also joined forces with Intel to establish the Business Readiness Rating, a new standard model for rating open source software (www.openbrr.org). The Software Conservancy, a nonprofit established by CollabNet, holds copyrights to donated open source software. Finally, Avalanche Corporate Technology Cooperative aims to provide an IP framework within which member IT departments can share solutions.
Are we entering a golden age of open-source software collaboration? Write me at [email protected].