CollabNet: Bringing open source to the rest of us

While allegiance to either open-source or proprietary software is still so often a religious debate, CollabNet serves as an example of a company that's benefiting from embracing the best of both worlds.

Brian Behlendorf, founder and CTO, told silicon.com in a recent interview that from the beginning the company's mission "was not specifically about releasing software under the GPL... but about taking what works about open source to everybody".

The California-based company makes tools - sold as a service - that help developers and business people collaborate on software projects. Its Enterprise Edition suite offers solutions for tasks such as version control and issue tracking, file sharing and search, discussion forums and mailing lists as well as project management.

Behlendorf saw a need for a new generation of such tools in the late-1990s while working on the Apache Web Server Project, of which he was co-founder. He and his compatriots didn't have an option available that was both comprehensive and integrated, he explained.

This led to the development of CollabNet, whose customers include commercial outfits such as Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Barclays, Motorola and the US Department of Defense as well as open-source players such as OpenOffice.org and the version control system Subversion.

The companies pay for the service on a per-user basis while open-source projects get a deal by paying a monthly fee instead.

Five-year-old CollabNet doesn't feel ashamed to get more deeply involved in open source than just providing the tools for development. When it saw the need for an open-source version control tool to succeed the industry standard CVS (Concurrent Versions System), it spearheaded the creation of the Subversion project by hiring four employees to get the process started and build a community around it.

Three years later, in the beginning of 2004, version 1.0 of Subversion appeared.

Behlendorf said the reasons for going the open-source route were twofold. First, "because we couldn't afford to write it all ourselves and couldn't afford to license [the available products]".

But secondly, the company wanted a competitive advantage over rivals such as Rational Software and VA Software by creating a solid product, which he felt the open-source model could provide.

"What [the Subversion team] felt comfortable releasing as a 1.0 was what most companies might call a 3.1," he said.

Having worked on both sides of the software world - open source and commercial - Brian Behlendorf takes an appropriately moderate view on the 'which software model is more secure' debate.

He said: "It ends up being a wash," meaning neither is clearly superior in terms of security.

The fact that open-source code is audited by many eyes is an advantage in finding security holes, but this same practice also makes it easier for individuals to find weaknesses to exploit than in proprietary software, he said.

The real difference, he continued, was the seriousness of the bugs: "[Open-source projects such as] Apache, Subversion and Mozilla - they all have their fair share of holes. But if you look at the bug reports you'll notice the severity of the holes in the OS stuff tends to be less [than in commercial software]."

Overall, though, he added, the "state of security" is getting better for both types of software, with bugs becoming less severe across the board.

CollabNet's tools are meant to give software developers the gear they need to write code and fix bugs while at the same time be accessible enough to the business folks keen to peek over their shoulder.

That's one of the reasons they're offered as a service over the web. The web interface is easy to use and makes working with others equally simple whether they are in the next cube or across an ocean.

These factors have been key in tying CollabNet's fortunes to the rise of another IT trend - outsourcing.

Over half of CollabNet's customers use the company's products for working with offshoring or outsourcing partners, Behlendorf said.

CollabNet has tested out these abilities itself, having purchased in May 2003 an India-based company called Enlite Technology.

Though Behlendorf said he was "sceptical" of handing off work to an outsourcing firm, the company needed to double its development staff to stay competitive - and didn't have the cash to hire that much talent in the US.

The solution was to buy Enlite, a creator of project management tools that were complementary to CollabNet's, and to create a worldwide development team - not unlike many open-source projects.

He pointed out how Finn Linus Torvalds, after posting the first version of the Linux kernel in 1991, immediately received feedback from the US, Europe, Asia - all over the world.

Behlendorf said: "Open-source development has been global since day one - and a lot of that has to do with the tools the OS community has used."