Open Source

With the associated uncertainty settling down, open source is going mainstream with no looking back. This is a welcome change

Sunday, December 18, 2005

Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

Last year felt the uncertainty with open source when SCO filed a case against use of patented code in the Linux (a premier open source operating system). With the uncertainty and doubts settling down, this year  started with a positive proclaim from IDC saying “Linux is now mainstream” (by the analyst Al Gillen). Further, the uncertainty is almost ending with a statement from OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) saying “Patent Threat to Linux is Receding”, made in November, this year. 

The customary Microsoft vs Linux/Open Source TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) studies continued without any impact (either positive or negative) to the growth of open source. This year saw open source started being adopted by Governments and lots of open source alternatives to commercial products sprucing up. Below is a brief jot down of some of the happenings to Open Source products/projects this year and what is in store for the coming year, 2006.

Open Source in Governments
Lots of action has happened and going to happen here. The low cost and non-proprietary model of open source should have always attracted governments and NGOs. It is this year that more than a couple of governments across the world adopted or started adopting open source. Indonesia announced the IGOS (Indonesia Goes Open Source) project last year. Under this project, this year, Indonesia 's Ministry of Research and Technology announced that it will implement a Java Desktop System (JDS), based on Linux and Open Source, as a national-standard desktop, designed for its own culture.

Followed by the famous Linux migration plan of Munich city(announced last year), Mannheim (another German city) has announced its plan to migrate to Linux. They also plan to eventually migrate to OpenOffice (an open source office suite) to replace MS Office products which are used currently.  The Munich migration plan itself got delayed till the next year. .

Brazil 's federal data processing agency Serpro  expects to complete its own migration to open-source software the end of this year.

Back at home, in India , C-DAC and the Ministry for Communications & Information Technology released a CD called “Hindi Software Tools” which consists of many open source software like Firefox, Gaim and OpenOffice.org in Hindi. Besides this, United Nations in India has started an initiative to migrate their community mailing lists (for AIDS, health, decentralization, education and other such topics)  called Solution Exchange, based on a proprietary product, to an open source solution. The new solution will consists of an open source mailing list as well as web based discussion, integrated with each other.

To sum up, the coming year should see some real success stories on the above migration attempts  embracing the adoption of open source to other governments,  especially in the developing countries.

Commercial going Open Source
This year saw the trend of many commercial companies open sourcing their closed source or proprietary products. Akiva released its collaboration solution (which is said to functionally compete with Microsoft Sharepoint and IBM Workspace) as an open source project called Silk. The aim was as obvious as involving a larger (all from across the globe) group of developers to improve the product.

RedHat went the commercial way with RedHat Enterprise Linux long back. But they left a strong ground for community involvement known as Fedora Core project – an open source, license free, Linux distribution. Today the cutting edge (thanks to the community involvement) Fedora Core project shapes the upcoming releases of RedHat Enterprise Linux. It all became a successful business model, with RedHat today, being one of the fastest growing  and the top 50 tech companies in Asia (declared by ZDNet Asia, towards the end of this year).

Perhaps, the same business model also encouraged SuSE (acquired by Novel). SuSE is known to be one of the  novice friendly Linux distributions.

Novell  released the distribution's code to the community and  OpenSUSE 10 (www.opensuse.org) made its debut this year.  Few more examples are those of of Alfresco (www.alfresco.org), an open source content management system and Zimbra (www.zimbra.com), a web-based e-mail and collaboration package.

Last but not the least, Sun Microsystems open sourced parts of its Solaris operating system this year and made the source code available at opensolaris.org.

Note that all these companies are still selling commercial products based on the open source products with add-ons like support and a few proprietary goodies.

The gist is, this year has seen a new business model being adopted by several vendors and the coming year should see more and more commercial vendors catching up with this model. The end user benefits from getting a solid, license free and feature rich product which is a summation of community involvement plus the vested efforts and interest of the commercial company.

For developers, this year
This year saw some new and much awaited release of open source products. The much awaited release of MySQL, version 5.0, was released this October. MySQL has been a very popular open source RDBMS but lacked features readily available in other enterprise grade databases like stored procedures and triggers. The 5.0 release of MySQL, which is ready for production use, fills this gap, making MySQL ready for more adoption by Enterprises and developers. 

A developer coming from Windows background would have always missed a Visual Basic like RAD (Rapid Application Development) on Linux. For those who missed the RAD as well as the language, Gambas (http://gambas.sourceforge.net/) for Linux  is an excelled alternative.

Gambas had been there for more than two years. But it is only this year that version 1.0 (a stable release) of Gambas was released.  Gambas provides an IDE which allows you to build a graphical application by dragging-n-dropping components onto a form. And you can use a Basic like language to write the code behind.

Along with PHP 4 and PHP 5, PHP 5.1 beta 1 also got released. The notable feature of the new release is PDO (PHP Data Objects) which is a database abstraction library similar to ADODB.

This year also gave good news to PHP developers and those who have been doubting the advantages of PHP over Java or .Net. Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen said that “PHP will be more popular than Java for building web-based applications”. Same month, Zend (the company behind the PHP engine) announced the PHP Collaboration Project. A Zend PHP Framework will be developed under this project which will bring to PHP a  robust and standard web application framework similar to that for Java and .NET.

This year, the winds seem to be moving in favor of open source developers. They now have a VB like RAD for Linux, a database with enterprise grade features and will soon have a framework  for web applications. All this is pointing to an easier, feature rich and standard based project development with open source tools, in the coming years.

Conclusions
Compared to yesteryears open source now seems to be more free-as in free from patents, free from uncertainty, free from doubts to adopt it. The greatest happening is commercial companies open sourcing their products which leaves us with possibilities to see more and better, enterprise grade, open source solutions. Governments' adoption of open source may mean an entirely new curriculum in education (like it happened in Kerala) and need for new skill sets in the public sector, resulting in more employment opportunities.

Page(s)   1