New reports from Evans Data and The 451 Group were issued last week about the health of the Open Source movement. The reports show that Open Source is gaining in commercial acceptance globally. Further, the reports find that software vendors with traditional licensing models are being increasingly pressured to reinvent their business models, and causing them not only to rethink how they license and distribute their software, but also causing them to realign their relationships with their customers.
Increasingly vendors are testing the waters by opening up some part of their software portfolios as Open Source. Microsoft has begun to experiment too, even as they continue to spread FUD as with comments in the news today from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer where he says that Open Source trampels Intellectual Property rights.
Microsoft started some years back with the “Shared Source” concept. More recently, Microsoft has set up a web site called Codeplex to host Open Source projects based on Microsoft technologies. An interesting example of the kinds of projects hosted on Codeplex is enterprise PLM software from a company called Aras. Aras has transformed their proprietary licensing model for their Innovator product to Open Source. More recently Microsoft has also begun experimenting with an incubator project called OfficeLabs within their Dynamics ERP and Dynamics CRM groups that is chartered as true Open Source.
The Evans Data study found that, rather than services revenue, more than half of the 31 vendors they surveyed said that their greatest revenue opportunity is in commerical licensing. It is quite common for vendors to offer Open Source Community editions that have limited forum-based support and to provide a commercial license for an enterprise supported version of their software.
Some critics charge that the original intent of the free share-and-share-alike philosophy of Open Source has been lost as more commercial entities are adopting some forms of the Open Source model. As an example, IBM has released strategic Open Source initiatives like Eclipse, OpenCloud, and Unstructured Information Analysis and Search (UIMA) that have driven revenues to IBM in the forms of compatible for-fee middleware and services, and at the expense of their competitors.
Another problem of Open Source often cited is that there are a flood of point Open Source solutions. Integrating all the pieces from Open Source together into more comprehensive enterprise business solutions can be a huge task, one that might lead you to reconsider the one-shop certified solutions coming out of Oracle, Microsoft or SAP.
A new organization has been formed called the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) that seeks to remedy the interoperability problem. The goal is to create something comparable to the big-vendor software suites and that provides consistent licensing and interoperability. Founding OSA members include EnterpriseDB, JasperSource, SpikeSource, and sourceforge.net.
