IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview: What You Need to Know to Meet the Open Source Juggernaut

Strong attendance at industry events like the Cloud Foundry Summit and the OpenStack Summit indicate that open source is no longer the sole purview of start-ups and small businesses. Facebook, Google and other enterprises are also using open source software these days.

IT professionals are evaluating how these open source products can help them meet their organizations’ responsibilities. Enterprise IT has a large and growing commitment to open source products in preference to proprietary alternatives. Open source has definite advantages, but there are important points to consider as well.

In this exclusive interview with IT Briefcase, Bernard Golden, Vice President of Strategy for ActiveState, talks about the pluses and possible minuses of embracing open source and what organizations should consider before taking the plunge.

Q: Let’s start out by taking a look at some of the benefits of open source. What does open source offer?

A. There are several that come immediately to mind. The first is greater transparency. The source code is available, of course, but all of the design deliberations, etc., are also out in the open, in contrast to the secretive processes of proprietary vendors. It’s easy to assess the product and its community to determine if using the product is a good decision.

Open source also increases innovation. No matter how good your developers are, there are more good developers who don’t work for you than who do. Using a product with a potentially much larger developer base enables access to greater innovation. There’s another way this is true, too: By allowing anyone to contribute code, an open source product incorporates unusual use cases, which a proprietary vendor would either ignore or dismiss.

Q: So, developers have more power to affect the product’s direction – yes?

A. Exactly. If you’re a small customer of a significant proprietary software vendor, the chances of getting your feature requests included are slim to none. But with open source, you can directly interact with developers to present your use cases; if it’s important enough, you can contribute code that implements your desired functionality.

Q: It seems like another benefit is that open source licensing models are a much better fit for Third Platform applications.

A. Yes. The inherent load variability of these applications means that new instances or containers are being started and stopped all the time. That’s a huge challenge when it comes to proprietary code products, which typically are licensed on a perpetual basis per instance/container. For an application with occasional extremely high use – perhaps for no more than 10 percent of its lifespan – that could mean purchasing a lot of licenses that rarely get used. Proprietary licenses work fine for static applications with stable use profiles, but they aren’t a good fit for the Third Platform.

Clearly, then, open source licenses are a much better fit for the Third Platform world. With no per-server/container cost, applications can be designed to support high load variability with no cost constraints. It’s this capability that suggests open source is on a fast track to dominating new applications. I predict that the glory days of proprietary infrastructure ISV are numbered.

Q: What are the top considerations for organizations thinking about going with open source?

A. Well, first of all, open source will be a key feature of enterprise IT going forward – that’s just the new reality. Second, identify your key open source components. While open source will be spread throughout your applications, certain components will represent critical dependencies. Those are ones you need to be certain about regarding their maturity, community size and robustness, and openness to code contributions and feature suggestions. For those components that represent dependencies, understand that you are, essentially, getting married. You can be just as locked in to an open source product as one that is proprietary, so keep your eyes open and decide if it’s something you can live with for a long time.

Third, understand that being fully engaged in open source requires more than just downloading and installing a software component. Staff must be more willing to build open source skills and be engaged with a product and its community; after all, there’s no “help desk” to call up for support.

Fourth, you need to make a decision about where to place any code you write. If you contribute it to the product—and go through what may be a challenging contribution process, depending upon the product—your code will become part of the product and be present in future releases. You’ll be expected to keep it current, which means an ongoing commitment — which is far less than the work you’ll take on if you don’t contribute your code, which requires re-integration with every release.

Q: Couldn’t that decision come back to bite you?

A. Absolutely! Which is why you need to carefully consider how you’re going to work this. Many IT organizations leverage open source components to build new applications, neglecting to factor in the reality that those applications become an ongoing engineering commitment. I see this in the Docker space, where many IT organizations have built homegrown DevOps tool chains that string together open source components. A few years from now, when the original engineers have moved on and the undocumented system is a confused jumble, you’ll learn that open source can result in legacy, too. Every line of code you write becomes an ongoing responsibility. Decide where you want to take on that responsibility and, in areas that don’t provide functionality or business differentiation, look to a commercial offering that takes responsibility for integrating and updating the application and all its open source components.

About Bernard Golden:

Named by Wired.com as one of the ten most influential persons in cloud computing, Bernard Golden serves as Vice President, Strategy for ActiveState Software. Prior to ActiveState he was Senior Director, Cloud Computing, for Dell Computer, which he joined when it acquired Enstratius, a leading cloud management software company, where he served as Vice President, Enterprise Solutions.

Bernard also serves as the cloud computing advisor for CIO Magazine; his blog has been named to over a dozen “best of cloud computing” lists and is read by tens of thousands of persons each month. He is a highly regarded speaker, and has keynoted cloud conferences around the world.

Bernard is the author or co-author of four books on virtualization and cloud computing, including his most recent book, Amazon Web Services for Dummies, published in 2013