Open source adoption: More rigor, less emotion

Determining a move toward open source and open standards needs to become a lot less emotional. And to get there companies need to cook up a policy for evaluating a move to open standards and open source.

Those are two of the big takeaways from Andrea Di Maio, an analyst at Gartner. Di Maio tried to thread the needle between the first wave open standards and source adoption, which is characterized by emotion, and a second wave, which will be led by companies looking to save money.

"We have to be less dogmatic about open source," says Di Maio. "You need careful analysis and a business case for adoption."

But first companies need to create a policy for choosing open standards and open source software. Di Maio says companies need to be able to evaluate the details of open source licenses, measure the maturity of open source software, figure out how to get value; establish channels to acquire open source products; evaluate risks; and define a policy to communicate with a community. Those aforementioned points are designed to ensure a company doesn't get locked into a vendor.

Di Maio, who has worked with companies and government entities in Europe, walked through the different rationales for going open source and adopting standards. Speaking at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, Di Maio portrayed a decision process that's pretty messy--especially if companies don't articulate why they want to move to open software and standards.

The first part of Di Maio's talk focused on open standards and how government and corporations have different motives for adoption. On the government site, entities may want to become less dependent on a vendor, diversify the tax base and create more jobs for developers. On the corporate side, the move to open standards is more about costs.

And those costs can sneak up on you. In a slide dubbed the "dark side of open standards" Di Maio outlined costs--consultants, audits and assessments, internal development, training, tools, process effort and distractions--associated with a move toward open standards.

Open source decisions are just as complicated with a bevy of moving parts. Here's a look at how one government would analyze a move to open source.

And while governments are bleeding edge on open source the debate is coming to a corporation near you. Open source software is common on servers, but is moving up the food chain. Here's Gartner's roadmap for open source adoption.

Another option that's emerging is the concept of community code. In this model a community develops source code in what becomes a co-op.

Community source is a software development and deployment model that aims to coordinate the work of different user IT organizations sharing the same purpose and set of common requirements. Participating organizations leverage internal application and development resources, with the expectations that others will do the same, in order to contribute to an outcome rather than take responsibility for it. Community source is about user-centric outcomes, not vendor-centric outcomes. The focus is not on building commercial IT offerings (proprietary products, open-source distributions or commercial open-source offerings), but creating operational systems that support the business objectives of its participants or embedded components of non-IT products.

In any case, companies need to consider the unintended consequences. For starters, if you use open source the chances are good that you will need more developers internally. Bottom line: More analysis will be needed as companies increasingly take the open source plunge.