For the last 10 years, open source software was supposed to take over the business world by storm. It makes sense for enterprises to embrace this model as it is free (at least from licensing point of view) and saves lot of money. Still that had not happened. Why?
The enterprises are primarily worried about maintenance aspect of open source software. If they run into a bug or an issue, who would they turn to for help? Similarly, if they need a new enhancement, who would they request that from? In the past few decades, enterprises moved away from the practice of building their own applications and adopted implementation of 3rd party packaged software solutions. These 3rd party providers don't have any incentive to make their IP public and loose lucrative license revenue. But there are providers like Red Hat, who pioneered a hybrid approach of supporting and maintaining open source software, thus alleviating some of the fears of enterprises. Still that practice is limited to systems and infrastructure software and not a common practice for enterprise applications software.
For any software solution to become reality, two components need to come together: WHAT and HOW. “WHAT” is the specification or the need of the business that requires to be translated into a software solution. “HOW” is the way to implement the solution. Normally in the traditional software world, WHAT is fulfilled by a Product Manager or a business user and HOW is fulfilled by a developer or technical expert.
Most of the open source software is built by developers that are passionate about open source movement. As most of these developers can clearly articulate their needs that are not met by current solutions available in the market, they can easily play both roles when it comes to software engineering tools. That is why almost all the open source software available addresses the development world’s needs. In fact, I am not aware of any real open source software that addresses the business needs of an enterprise. There are few software companies that made their source code public, and moved to support and maintenance only mode. To me that is out of their inability to sell licenses. It is not really true open source model. Even though the code is in public domain, I am not sure anyone else actively contributing to it.
So, it comes down to whether subject matter experts can actively become part of the open source community and help build the enterprise software. When that happens, I believe open source software will become a reality in enterprise applications space. Till that point, long live all enterprise software companies!!
Excellent point, "subject matter experts can actively become part of the open source community".
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting because it also depends on the level of education/intelligence of the subject matter(domain) expert who want to be part of the community. For a domain like Microfinance it's difficult to find intelligent people on the other hand domains like Medical(OpenMRS) and Accounting(OpenBravo) has very intelligent people who usually take leadership role in community.
I am in a situation where I am trying to become "subject matter expert", while hoping to find more leadership around the community. (http://mifos.org)