Opinion: 2006 - the year for open source

It's a perfect time for open source proponents to put down their 'Microsoft Bad, Open Source Good' banners and start addressing the concerns of large enterprises and government agencies, says Simon Moores.

My last column on open source provoked the inevitable remarks I've come to expect every time I pop my head above the parapet, take a deep breath and attempt to take an objective look at the progress of open source software (OSS), which I've been doing since I was one of the first columnists to take an interest in 'penguin' evolution.

Once again, I expect to be shot down in flames by the open source groupies. I sometimes wonder if the author Salman Rushdie gives an occasional sigh of relief that he wrote the Satanic Verses and not a column on Linux.

What continues to worry me about the open source debate is that objectivity is still blurred by an emotional attachment to one side of the argument or another which is more commonly found in hardened football supporters.

OSS enthusiasts may be pleased to hear that following a well-attended Westminster presentation by my colleague Dr Mohammed Al-Ubaydli of the Conservative Technology Forum, entitled "Open source software for government", I'm involved in a project to explore the practical application of OSS to deliver integrated and workable public sector solutions - in particular using bottom-up OSS in the health service to help rescue a still shaky-looking National Programme for IT (NPfIT).

It's now 2006, over seven years since I first started writing on this subject, and what continues to worry me about the open source debate is that objectivity is still blurred by an emotional attachment to one side of the argument or another which is more commonly found in hardened football supporters.

From the evidence around us, this should be the year (once again) where the OSS argument achieves a critical mass and credibility, supported by the evidence of its success across the entire IT spectrum.

For this to happen, the movement's more vocal proponents need to leave the emotional baggage of 'Microsoft Bad, Open Source Good' behind and concentrate on resolving the central themes of the OSS case in a way which satisfies not just cynical columnists like me but the big enterprise and government customers. These are the very organisations that could make a real difference to its future as a sensible and commercially sound technology alternative.

For this to happen, then, we need to recognise the fundamental differences in the Linux and Windows models and accept that while there are advantages in the OSS componentisation model, there are a number of valid potential customer objections which are expressed in the complexity, management and cost of maintaining an OSS environment.

For medium sized-organisations, for instance, OSS still presents many challenges which most frequently involve a poorer grasp of OSS benefits, resource constraints and the worry over what is perceived as a brutal costs-penalty incurred in any move away from a Windows environment.

As Winston Churchill said, "If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future." This is a sentiment that can just as easily be applied to the TCO/ROI debate which Microsoft and IBM have used successfully to muddy the OSS argument to a degree that it's very hard to establish what it true.

A great deal of time and money has been spent on whether to focus on TCO, the total cost of ownership of running specific workloads, or trying to gauge the ROI (return on investment) - invariably a rather abstract metric.

Both are less factors of the underlying operating system than the applications and services that support the servers. Server choices are dictated by the application and TCO in particular doesn't properly examine the real savings and flexibility that one server platform or another may offer.

These are just a few of the issues we need to see clearly resolved in 2006 if OSS is going to make real headway. It's no longer a question of a seismic event which sees Microsoft going the way of the dinosaurs. Instead it's visibly becoming an evolutionary process which supports an uneasy co-existence and recognises the arrival of OSS as a major software technology.

The only real question in my mind is how long it will take Linux to pass the critical 30 per cent server market share figure, the same question that I asked in 1999. Leaving the last word to Winston Churchill: "I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else."