Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » InformationWeek: How to tell the open source losers from the winners

February 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

InformationWeek: How to tell the open source losers from the winners

TAGS: Open Source

Charlie Babcock has a fantastic article on the rising tide of open source in the latest edition of InformationWeek. As I've written recently, the bar is getting lower to launch a successful open source business. That said, there are tens of thousands of lame open source projects, for every good one (the same is true of proprietary software, btw). As Babcock writes:

There are 139,834 open source projects under way on SourceForge, the popular open source hosting site. Five years from now, only a handful of those projects will be remembered for making lasting contributions--most will remain in niches, unnoticed by the rest of the world. For every Linux, Apache, or MySQL, dozens of other open source efforts fizzle out.

That's a dilemma for the many companies that are expanding their use of open source. Corporate developers and other IT professionals must get better at divining the winners and ignoring the losers. The wrong picks can lead companies down a rat hole of support problems and obsolete software.

Good bets for the next round of open source innovation include the Mule enterprise service bus, Alfresco content management system, and Spring framework for Java applications. But what about the 139,831 other options?

Indeed. How is an enterprise to know if a project will succeed? Even if the code is good, will there be a community or company (or, preferably in the commercial open source world, both) there to drive it forward for years to come?

One test is community. The great thing about open source is that it's fairly easy to measure community, even if not quantitatively (i.e., number of developers, though that's a great metric):

Hi5 [which will be speaking at OSBC on its open source experience] tested the quality of the Hyperic community by posting questions to it, and had problems getting adequate answers at first. It got around that by building relationships directly with the support team for Hyperic Inc., the company behind the project, which was eager to work with an early customer of an emerging project.

[T]ransparency...marks any vibrant open source project. A community needs to be measured by its activity and transparency as much as its size. The reasons for decisions must be clear, with threads of discussion in forums leading up to them, and negative and positive comments getting their airing. That's one of open source's most powerful ingredients.

Of course, as the article notes, there's a certain amount of luck (politely called "timing") to any successful software: filling the right need at the right time:

Apache and Subversion are "products that were well timed," contends Behlendorf. "They occurred at the beginning of intense need for their kind of functionality." In other words, they were leading-edge innovations. Zack Urlocker, executive VP of products at MySQL AG, says open source code must overturn an established way of doing things. This is open source's "sometimes-overlooked role as a disruptive force," Urlocker says.

The cost of failure is no higher than with proprietary software (and arguably much lower since you fail much sooner into the process, without much or any license cost), but the value from success is much higher, as H&R Block found out with Alfresco:

Getting to the Alfresco decision wasn't easy, and the commercial support isn't cheap. H&R Block will pay $100,000 in support its first year of use. But that's one-tenth of a similar commercial product support contract, Cahoon says. The company's initially doing several deployments at headquarters, but it wanted a cost low enough to leave open the possibility of a major rollout to its extensive branch offices. "We wanted our choice to scale both technically and economically," says Cahoon. Finding an open source option wasn't the easy way, but H&R Block met that goal.

Indeed, it did. Read the article for more info on success with MuleSource, Hyperic, Spring, and a range of other open source projects.

Posted by Matt Asay on February 3, 2007 10:10 AM

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