KEY POINTS:
If your business hasn't yet dipped its toe into the open-source software waters, it's as behind the times as a company five years ago that was not yet on the internet.
So says Don Christie, the director of Wellington software company Catalyst IT and president of the New
Zealand Open Source Society, which advances the open-source cause in this country.
"If people in technical roles didn't get the internet, you wondered what they were doing in their jobs. Open source is at that same place now. If people don't realise the value it can add to their business, then you might wonder what they're doing in their technical role. It's mainstream."
Christie, who makes his living developing software for customers such as the Otago Daily Times, which has launched a website based on open-source content management system Drupal, says the war of words between proponents of open-source and proprietary software is over.
Open source may not have wiped proprietary software - from the likes of Microsoft and Oracle - off the planet, but the two are co-existing quite happily.
That's the view of others, as well. Amit Gupta, New Zealand head of ICT market analyst IDC, says being for or against open-source software is no longer a matter of principle.
"The movement has matured. It's driven now by a desire primarily to have more control and freedom."
Steve Osborn, who leads a group of about 40 open-source specialists at ICT services company Gen-i, says antagonism has been replaced by "co-opetition".
"In the past year to 18 months there has been greater opportunity to integrate open-source or community-based applications into what we would call closed-source or proprietary environments such as Microsoft, for example."
Osborn has a good opportunity to see how the two interact since Gen-i sells products from born-again open-source companies Sun and Novell, and Microsoft - although its Microsoft business is several times the size of what it makes from open source. But those proportions are changing. An increasing number of organisations are looking at open source, spurred by proprietary software licensing issues.
"There are a number of organisations building policies around how to bring open-source components into their solutions."
They're asking whether open-source software has the necessary support, whether it is flexible enough to be integrated with existing systems, and if it is secure. Proponents will say it has all of those things, and much more.
The proof is in the fact that open-source software can be found everywhere, says Christie, in particular as the fabric of the internet. Organisations that shun it are turning their backs on the opportunities presented by the latest web technologies.
"They'd be missing out on the technological revolution that is ongoing. They'd be missing out on what all these Web 2.0 companies are building their solutions on.
"They'd be missing out on being agile and able to adjust to new technology fast and being able to integrate different layers of software in a very flexible and rich manner. So they'd be missing out on opportunities."
Open source's low cost is one factor in its spread. Under the general public licence (GPL) terms of its distribution, open-source software is free. That doesn't mean a developer can't charge for its work.
But when it creates a program using modified GPL code, those modifications must be returned to the open-source community.
It's a distribution model that works well for developers and their customers, but is anathema to vendors that closely guard the inner workings of the software they sell. In the open-source world, Christie says, the developer community shares the improvements made to software.
"Software now doesn't have a five-year lifespan. If you're lucky it has a one-year lifespan before something has to change. You just can't keep up with that with a proprietary hegemony.
"Cost is one issue - when you look at the kind of money being spent on web start-ups today compared to the late 1990s, it's about 10 times lower. But the critical thing for businesses these days is time to market.
"Something might take two years [for a proprietary software developer] to build and you've totally missed the opportunity. It might be wonderfully well architected, but in terms of the opportunity that might have existed when the project started, it's gone.
"Being able to build stuff with the tools and systems open source gives you reduces that time hugely."
IDC's Gupta says organisations adopting open-source systems are doing so on merit.
"Most companies have extensive investments in their infrastructure and applications. As a result it's not that straightforward to rip and replace or move to open source. It does require a considerably diligent and holistic evaluation process."
Gen-i's Osborn lists many of the same benefits highlighted by Christie: "Flexibility, the ability to accelerate delivery, you can simplify solutions by cutting back a lot of the layers."
At the same time, the modularity of products such as Drupal mean components that have made their way into the open-source community from developers all over the world can be assembled to create a feature-rich application.
"With open-source components ... you can get better business payback in a shorter period of time because you have the ability to ... develop product rather than buy a packaged solution."
But Osborn highlights a couple of obstacles to wider open-source adoption among big organisations. One is a lack of ready-made applications of the kind large enterprises need, and the other is a shortage of local developers who can write them.
"As the open-source arena comes of age, we need more business-based solutions."
What Christie is promising, as head of the NZOSS, is to make it easier for big businesses to share support for open-source systems, along similar lines to an initiative in Australia."If I've got one goal this year it's to make that a demonstrable thing for New Zealand as well."
