Open Source Case for Business

Supportive Documents:

• Ernie Ball (guitar string manufacturer) switches to open source and saves $80,000.

• Open Source-onomics: Examining some pseudo-economic arguments about Open Source.

• MITRE REPORT: "A Business Case Study of Open Source Software".

• "Your Open Source Plan" from CIO magazine.

The open-source model has a lot to offer the business world.

The open-source model means increased security; because code is in the public view it will be exposed to extreme scrutiny, with problems being found and fixed instead of being kept secret until the wrong person discovers them. And last but not least, it's a way that the little guys can get together and have a good chance at beating a monopoly.

Of all these benefits, the most fundamental is increased reliability. And if that's too abstract for you, you should think about how closed sources made the Year 2000 problem worse and why they might have very well killed your business.

The Reliability Problem

Gerald P. Weinberg once famously observed that, "If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization." He was right. Up to now, the reliability of most software has been atrociously bad.

The foundation of the business case for open-source is high reliability. Open-source software is peer-reviewed software; it is more reliable than closed, proprietary software. Mature open-source code is as bulletproof as software ever gets.

Until recently this was a radical idea to many businesspeople; many had a belief that open-source software is necessarily not "professional," that it is shoddily made and more prone to fail than closed software.

But the Internet's infrastructure makes the best possible refutation, and since OSI was founded in 1998 many people have been paying attention. Consider DNS, sendmail, the various open-source TCP/IP stacks and utility suites, and the open-source scripting languages such as Perl that are behind most "live" content on the Web. These are the running gears of the Internet. (Read this for a look at what would happen if they disappeared).

These open-source programs have demonstrated a level of reliability and robustness under fast-changing conditions (including a huge and rapid increase in the Internet's size) that, considered against the performance record of even the best closed commercial software, is nothing short of astonishing.

You can read an extended technical argument for the superior reliability of general open-source software in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". This paper was behind Netscape's pioneering decision to take its client software open-source. It describes a bazaar style of managing software development that depends on open source and leads to high reliability and quality.

The real-world evidence backs this up. In an independent head-to-head reliability test, open-source Unix systems and utilities were less fragile – crashed or hung less often – than their proprietary counterparts. The paper describing this test is available here.

The business implication of this technical case is clear. Eventually, bazaar-mode peer review will come to be considered a necessary condition for highest quality. In many market niches, software that has not been peer-reviewed simply won't be perceived as good enough to compete.