The Linux Extremist

I recently stopped chatting on a politics website because it was clear that it had become infested with idiots. The worst among them was quite possibly the most stubbornly dumb and patrionising person I’ve ever encountered online. I can’t say that it’s often that murder occurs to me, but it was clear that this person was wasting oxygen by being alive, and would serve a greater purpose as compost.

His particular obsession was Open Source, deriding it as some sort of Communist plot. Perhaps some of you have seen nice little pieces of pop art like this one:

Of course, this is a joke. However the walking, talking rectum to which I refer takes it literally.

I have some bad news for him and for anyone else who believes this. Open Source is good for business, actually.

How so? Well, first and foremost, Open Source reduces the costs of entry into the marketplace. If I want to set up a website selling widgets, I don’t have to pay ridiculous Microsoft license fees in order to build my solution, nor do I require expensive software to develop it in the first place. Similarly, if I am setting up a new business and I need office software for my people, I don’t require signing my soul over to some bank to provide it.

But beyond this, Open Source is encouraging a new model for software development. The term “paradigm shift” gets abused, but in this case it’s absolutely correct. The old paradigm meant that each business had to develop its software suites in entirety - it had to hire all the developers, project managers and QA personnel in order to build and release a solution. For a company whose business isn’t software this seems an extraneous expense. It’s much cheaper to pay for some developers to initiate and guide a project, and then tap into the vast expertise of the open source community to provide additional ideas, skills and testing.

Furthermore, it’s a proven methodology for producing great software. Compare Internet Explorer to Firefox, for example. Compare Ubuntu Linux’s on-time releases to Windows Vista’s tardiness.

This is not some airy fairy concept either - companies such as Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein have actually taken this route and with great success as an article in CIO Magazine states:

Financial services companies are getting in on the open-source action as well. What began in 1997 as an internal effort to consolidate integration development at international investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) has become Openadaptor, a Java-based open-source integration platform. “The most common thing you have in a bank is communication between systems,” says Steve Howe, DrKW’s vice president and head of open-source initiatives. In the late 1990s, the company set out to create a standardized programming interface that would keep internal developers from having to reinvent basic code for every new project. The code behind the interface was shared with all of the company’s developers, and each was able to make suggestions for—and sometimes even changes to—the source code. The result was a dramatic decrease in development time for connectors.

And:

The system worked so well, in fact, that DrKW hired software development collaboration provider CollabNet, which hosts collaborative development environments for both commercial and open-source projects, to release its connector platform in open source as the organization Openadaptor. DrKW wagered that if other organizations got involved, it would result in further enhancements to the platform. The idea worked. The core software currently sees more than 8,000 downloads a month of the organization’s site. And while no one knows exactly how many corporations are taking part, Howe says that Deutsche Bank, Hallifax Bank of Scotland, Hewlett-Packard, J.P. Morgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland are all involved.

So far from being some sort of Communist plot, Open Source is a wave of the future. The new paradigm is a shift away from proprietary software to businesses sharing development resource to build solutions - this encourages code re-use and allows for standardisation, improving communication between businesses. The customer benefits because the code less full of errors and institutions have less trouble communicating between each other, furthermore the cost component of what they pay for goods and services is reduced.

Of course none of this will penetrate the thinking of those who are bound to the old paradigm. They’d rather that scaremongering about latent Communism won the day. However, it appears businesses have woken up to the fact that such scaremongering is the marketing tool of the desperate, or in the case of the aforementioned idiot, the asinine.

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