Enterprise IT: Open source deadbeats

Pogo said it best: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The old Walt Kelly cartoon character came to mind as Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst gave a talk at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco this week.

“Us,” in this case, is enterprise IT. After beating on the commercial software model, which he characterized rightly as making the customers buy the same software over and over again, Whitehurst said, “Red Hat’s biggest competition is not Microsoft or Novell. Our biggest competition is customers not renewing and continuing to use our software without a subscription.”

What made his comments stand out even more, was one of the central themes of the conference: The recession is good for open source.

[ For more coverage of this year’s OSBC, see “Red Hat CEO questions desktop’s relevance in Linux debate” and “Microsoft, Novell ponder opportunities in sour economy.” ]

In fact, quite a few of the sessions stressed that because IT departments are strapped for cash, open source looks like a great deal.

Fair enough. But Whitehurst’s point shows us this mentality cuts two ways: If open source is a good deal because its total cost of ownership is much lower than that of commercial offerings, isn’t it an even better deal to pay nothing at all?

Enterprise accountability and the open source movement

Speaking of something for nothing, Southwest Airlines — known for giving customers reasonable deals — pays next to nothing for the open source software that runs much of its ticketing and reservations system.

“They are a giant leech,” one veteran open source exec told me during a break at the conference. “They don’t pay; they don’t contribute code back to the community.”

Southwest is hardly alone. “Enterprise IT is the biggest consumer of open source software, and it gives almost nothing back to the community,” says Matt Asay, founder of the conference and vice president of business development at Alfresco.

Asay was actually referring to a second, perhaps thornier, issue: The obligation to contribute code to the open source community. Google’s role, for example, has been a hot-button issue, with some maintaining that Google is also a leech, while others, including Asay, say the search giant has changed its ways as of late and is now a better actor.

To get other companies to become better actors, accountability may be essential to action. And to get a better handle on how companies are approaching this obligation, I’d like to open the floor. Let me know your thoughts on code contribution — and feel free to name names, good actors as well as bad. You can post your thoughts here, or better still send me an e-mail so I can follow up. If need be, I’ll withhold your name.

Open source has a long way to go

With more than 400 of the leading lights of the open source world gathered in one room, you’d think it would be easy to spot a laptop running Ubuntu or Gnome or SLED or your Uncle Al’s Linux desktop distro, but you’d be wrong. Amazingly, one of the OSBC discussion groups found startled attendees looking up to a Windows XP screensaver projected on the demonstration screen.

Of course, I don’t mean to beat on the hard work of the folks running the conference or to make too much of a minor faux pas, but the incident does raise a serious point. Open source has a long way to go. A recent survey by IDC found that while 22 percent of the IT execs queried had Linux in use, fully 97 percent said they are running Windows in their shops.

The same breakout session, which happened to be about funding open source during the downturn, provided some good news as well: Venture capital still has an appetite for open source startups.

Peter Fenton, general partner at VC firm Benchmark Capital, said his portfolio companies were within 10 percent to 15 percent of plan in the last quarter of 2008, not bad considering how most tech companies have fared. Performance this quarter, he projects, will be better.

Fenton echoed another important theme of the conference: Cloud computing is where open source will go. One opportunity: Selling monthly subscriptions on top of a third-party infrastructure, such as Amazon’s EC2, says Fenton.

And by foregoing licenses in favor of the cloud, you might just assure that your customers continue paying to use your wares.

[Disclosure: InfoWorld is a sponsor of the Open Source Business Conference.]

I welcome your comments, tips and suggestions. Reach me at bill.snyder@sbcglobal.net.