 | Level: Introductory Douglas Heintzman, Staff, IBM
05 Jul 2003 from The Rational Edge: This article examines the role of standards as well as the role of open source software in the market today.
The IT industry is going through
major changes. New concepts in technology, such as Web services and
grid computing, are opening the door to tremendous opportunities for
taking e-business to the next level of profitability. The potential
of these technologies to transform business is truly remarkable, and
open standards and open source software will play increasingly
critical roles in this new world
Just as open standards were critical to the emergence of the Internet and the
first generation of e-business, they will play a critical role in the next generation
of e-business on demand.® IBM defines an on-demand business as being:
"A company whose business processes ? integrated end-to-end across the company
and with key partners, suppliers and customers ? can respond with flexibility
and speed to any customer demand, market opportunity or external threat. An
on demand business has four key attributes: it is responsive, variable, focused
and resilient."
In the first generation of e-business, standards allowed heterogeneous systems
to communicate with each other and exchange data. This was critical to the development
of the World Wide Web, e-markets, e-commerce, and inter-company integration.
These capabilities drove cost down and productivity up, while increasing both
speed to market and business agility. During the next ten years, business agility
will continue to be the critical business differentiator for businesses and
governments, and those that can shift their business strategies quickly in response
to market dynamics, emerging opportunities, and competitive threats will prosper
as on demand organizations. In this next generation of e-business on demand
? where computing resources become virtualized with corresponding flexibility
and cost variability, where application function is discovered and bound to
in a remote and just-in-time way, and where IT systems and business processes
become integrated horizontally ? open computing and standards will become more
important than ever.
This article will examine the role of standards as well as the role of open
source software in the market today. While the roles of standards and open source
software do overlap in that many companies who are using open source in part
as a means of implementing open standards, the cores of their respective value
propositions are distinct and should be discussed as such.
Definitions
One of the great challenges in the industry dialogue regarding
"open" concepts is a clear definition for each of the various terms.
Clarity of definition should contribute to clarity of discussion.
For the purpose of this paper, the following definitions will be
used:
Open computing ? a general and inclusive term that is
used to describe a philosophy of building IT systems. In hardware,
open computing manifests itself in the standardization of plug and
card interfaces; and in software, through communication and
programming interfaces. Open computing allows for considerable
flexibility in modular integration of function and vendor
independence.
Open standards ? interfaces or formats that are openly
documented and have been accepted in the industry through either
formal or de facto processes, and which are freely available
for adoption by the industry. In the context of this article the
term will be used to specifically refer to software interfaces.
Examples that many people are familiar with include HTTP, HTML, WAP,
TCP/IP, VoiceXML, XML, and SQL. They are typically built by software
engineers from various IT/software companies who collaborate under
the auspices of organizations such as W3C, OASIS, OMA, and IETF.
Proprietary ? describes interfaces that are developed by
and controlled by a given company and have not been made freely
available for adoption by the industry. Proprietary software uses
non-public interfaces or formats. When an interface is non-public,
the owner of the proprietary interface controls it, including when
and how the interface changes, who can adopt it, and how it is to be
adopted.
Open source software ? software whose source code is
published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy,
modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or
fees. Open source code evolves through community cooperation. These
communities are composed of individual programmers as well as very
large companies. Some examples of open source initiatives are Linux,
Eclipse, Apache, Mozilla, and various projects hosted on
SourceForge.
Free software and software libre ? terms that are roughly
equivalent to Open Source. The term "free" is meant to
describe the fact that the process is open and accessible and anyone
can contribute to it. "Free" is not meant to imply that there is no
charge. "Free software" may be packaged with various features and
services and distributed for a fee by a private company. The term
"public domain" software is often erroneously used interchangeably
with the term "free software" and "open source" software. In fact,
"public domain" is a legal term that refers to software whose
copyright is not owned by anyone, either because it has expired, or
because it was donated without restriction to the public. Unlike
open source software, public domain software has no copyright
restrictions at all. Any party may use or modify public domain
software.
Commercial software ? software that is distributed under
commercial license agreements, usually for a fee. The main
difference between the commercial software license and the open
source license is that the recipient does not normally receive the
right to copy, modify, or redistribute the software without fees or
royalty obligations. Many people use the term "proprietary software"
synonymously with "commercial software." Because of the potential
confusion with the term "proprietary" in the context of standards
and interfaces, and because commercial software may very well
implement open, non-proprietary interfaces, this article will use
the term "commercial software" to refer to non-open source software.
The open computing environment
Most major companies and governments have embraced the concept of
open computing. They purchase IT goods and services from a variety
of vendors and expect the technologies to work together. They wish
to have the flexibility to deploy hardware and software in a
specific way in order to address specific business problems. They do
not wish to be subjected to the priorities and schedules of any
particular vendor. Open computing provides them with a way to treat
technology components as discrete modules that can be mixed and
matched.
There are a number of common beliefs associated with this trend.
In the first place, IT organizations investing in open computing
believe it will maximize their flexibility and, consequently, the
amount of business agility they have. They believe that open
computing will allow them to rapidly adopt technology innovations
and to exploit technology cost reductions. They believe open
computing will provide them some degree of vendor independence. Well
thought-out architecture and open standards are critical elements of
open computing. Increasingly, companies are using open source
software as a means of accelerating the adoption of open standards
which subsequently allows them to implement open computing.
A brief history of open standards
Interfaces are the means by which the many elements of an
application talk to each other and to other applications.
Historically, interfaces were built by companies to allow internal
and external programmers to add to the function of an application
and to allow the value of an application to be enhanced with the
capabilities of other applications. Companies that owned these
interfaces wielded considerable control, which in turn enabled them
to sell vertical software "stacks" to customers, or to assemble
software stacks1
that drove value into hardware platforms. This control model was
very successful and the source of considerable profits for many of
the major founders of the IT industry. When a company said they were
an IBM shop, an HP shop, or a DEC shop, it really meant that, for
the most part, they ran their business on a particular
manufacturer's hardware and software.
In the 1980s computing technology started to become more
stratified with much more distinct horizontal structures. Computer
hardware became more commoditized and architectures more open. This
led to greater degrees of modularization, interoperability, and the
development of a marketplace for peripherals. The net effect was an
increase in the rate of innovation, greater value for dollar, and a
certain degree of loss of account control by hardware vendors. The
software side of the equation also saw horizontal stratification.
Operating systems became more generic and independent of hardware
platforms. The middleware layer evolved, allowing for greater cost
effectiveness and greater innovation at the client layer since
application vendors were freed from having to worry about the
plumbing.
These developments started to force interface standardization,
which became vital in the effort to exploit networking technology
and the growing usage of the Internet. The potential for computers
to communicate with each other and for great stores of information
to be virtualized was predicated on simple and standardized
communications and interfaces. Therefore, while it may have been
possible for a business to be an IBM, HP, or DEC shop in the past,
it had become impossible for any one company to control the
interfaces that ran the world's networks.
During the 1990's a number of major companies made strategic
decisions to embrace this evolution toward open standards. These
decisions were based on simple pragmatism: If we are going to live
forever more in a networked world, then that networked world must
run on open standards. This development has been good news for
customers of IT and the IT industry in general. The skill and
resources of these industry players have been critical in the
development of robust, functional, and highly practical interfaces
that are critical enablers of e-business.
The battle of "openness" is still being waged. For the most part
businesses have embraced open standards as a means of ensuring
degrees of flexibility and vendor independence. Many vendors have
also embraced open standards, either because their role in the
ecosystem as a provider of horizontal infrastructure or networking
capability necessitates it, or because of their desire to
participate in markets dominated by other players who use their
market position to promote their proprietary interfaces. Some
vendors have been successful in exploiting what economists call the
"network effect" ? the tendency towards adoption of a common
platform owing to the intersecting interests and interdependencies
of ecosystem participants, including consumers. In turn, these
companies have been able to exert control over programming
interfaces and document formats to protect their market positions.
However, with the increasing momentum towards open standards and
development of powerful alternative approaches such as XML, Web
services, and J2EE (which isn't so much a standard as a widely
adopted programming model), the ability to exploit proprietary
interfaces for competitive advantage will likely diminish.
The role of open source software
It has become clear that open source software (OSS) has an
important role to play in the IT industry and business in general.
Yet there is considerable confusion about the strengths and
weaknesses of OSS. Some believe it will eventually replace the
commercial software model, even that OSS is a critical element of a
modern democracy. Others decry OSS as the single greatest threat to
capitalism and the principles of intellectual property ? the ruin
of Western society. Neither of these extremes is accurate. OSS, for
the most part, represents a software development process. It can be
leveraged to provide considerable value and complement commercial
software products. At the same time, commercial software products
will continue to play a critical role for the foreseeable future.
(The rationale for this conclusion will be discussed below.)
Open source software (OSS) isn't developed by any one company; it
is developed by a community, and it comes in many flavors. For
example, the Linux movement was started by an individual who was
quickly joined by many others who used the Internet to collaborate
on the project we know today as the leading open source platform.
Others such as Apache are offshoots of academic work. Some, such as
Mozilla and Eclipse, were seeded by substantial code donations from
major software companies.
Open source projects
OSS describes many different kinds of projects, each with
different characteristics. These projects are long term and
evolutionary in nature and don't usually have a defined end point.
It is useful to break these groups down into four major
subcategories, as described below.
- "Academic" projects: University students and
professors, and researchers from academic, public, and private
research facilities use OSS as a means of peer review. OSS
provides a mechanism for others to comment on their work, review
its merit, and improve the code. Some researchers and companies
publish their work to the public in order to promote discussion
and innovation. Some companies use the publication of academic
open source as a means of improving relations with other
developers and researchers and even to attract talent. The
emphasis is on innovative function. The code base typically isn't
structured in such a way ? and isn't stable enough ? to deploy
in a commercial setting. IBM Research is an active participant in
this community and publishes many research projects for peer
review.
- "Foundation" projects: These projects focus on some of
the lower layers of the software stack. The major examples are
Linux (operating system), Eclipse (development tools framework),
Apache (HTTP server), Globus (grid computing), and Mozilla (Web
browser). These types of projects represent the bulk of open
source community development. They are delivering the bulk of the
value of the Open Source movement and have by far the highest
level of commercial deployments and support infrastructure. These
projects have large and vibrant communities supporting them. Many
also have large commercial software companies supporting them
including IBM.
- "Middleware" projects: These projects are focused on
areas such as application servers, databases, and portals. This
group includes Web application servers such as Tomcat and JBoss,
Databases such as MySQL, and Portal software such as Jetspeed. In
most cases these communities have small private companies at their
core who have service business models. These communities have not
attracted a critical mass of programmers and are only likely to
have a marginal impact on the software industry in the near term.
The dynamics of this category will be discussed below.
- "Niche" projects: This group represents the bulk of the
56,000 registered projects at SourceForge.org (a Web-based
repository of OSS projects). These projects are typically very
small, and have very niche focus. Many are experiments or toolkits
developed by industry organizations. They collectively represent a
significant influence on the market but individually have
negligible impact. Code from these projects is used to test
against and as a source of ideas and techniques.
There is one other category ? "Walled Gardens" projects
? that uses some of the same community development processes, but
which is not really an open source project: i.e., the source code is
not available to be modified by the public at large. Walled garden
projects are composed of small groups of companies that put in place
a mechanism to collaborate on the development of some common
technology that all participants may access. The source code from
this kind of project is only available to members of the walled
community, whose membership is typically by invitation only and
supported by dues. These types of projects are not common.
Commercial software companies may also use a walled garden approach
as an internal development process.
The role of foundation and middleware projects
Of the open source project groups described above, the two most
frequently discussed are the "foundation" projects and the
"middleware" projects. These are the areas with potentially
disruptive influence in the market.
It is quite normal that mature, common, "foundation" layers of
technology will become commoditized over time. Value will migrate to
higher and more innovative layers. This has certainly been true of
the hardware industry and will also be true of the software
industry. We have seen many examples of this already. TCP/IP stacks,
compressions tools, Web servers, and browsers come to mind. As a
rule, the adoption of open standards by an industry will accelerate
this migration of value as the cost of entry to a market falls and
customers have greater choice. There have been some exceptions to
this phenomenon ? notably desktop operating systems and basic
office productivity function. These markets have been protected in
large part by the "network effect" discussed earlier. The
combination of network effect and control over proprietary
interfaces has slowed the rate of commoditization and allowed the
realization of considerable control and profitability from those
product areas.
Open source software, specifically Linux, has the potential to
disrupt the status quo. Already Linux has presented a serious
challenge to Microsoft's strategy to move into the Unix server
business with Windows/Intel economics. Linux has become a very
capable and scalable server operating system. Many companies and
governments have implemented Linux servers. Linux offers them some
key advantages. On the low end Linux on Intel provides attractive
economics. In the mid range Linux can run on high performance RISC
servers and has great affinity with Unix. On the very high end Linux
can run on mainframe business computers and even runs some of the
world's most powerful super computers. This kind of scalability and
multiplatform support has some very obvious advantages, including:
1) the ability to scale IT systems to match shifting business
requirements, 2) the ability to optimize programmer productivity and
minimize support requirements, and 3) the ability to leverage new
innovations and take advantage of new cost structures regardless of
platform.
To a lesser extent, Linux is also making inroads on the desktop.
As companies and governments seek more cost effective ways to
deliver IT services to their user populations, the combination of
the efficiencies of Linux, the runtime support of Java, the Web
application model supported by a Web browser, and the aggregation
and personalization services of a portal ? combined with high
function open source office alternatives such as "Open Office" ?
are providing a viable and financially attractive alternative to the
traditional Windows environment.
Health and sustainability for foundation OSS projects
The growing popularity of Linux and open standards leads to an
interesting question: How far up the software stack will open
standards and open source accelerate commoditization, and at what
rate? There are many factors to consider, the two most important
being 1) the health and sustainability of a community and 2) the
involvement of major industry players.
Regarding the size and relative health of the open source
communities, we can distinguish the work of software development
communities focused on the foundation/platform projects and the work
of major industry players focused on projects at higher levels in
the software stack.
Let's take a look at these two factors driving today's OSS
"foundation" projects.
Large and healthy developer communities
As noted earlier, projects such as Linux, Eclipse, Mozilla,
Globus, and Apache have relative large and healthy developer
communities. There are a number of reasons for this success, from
both a business perspective as well as a developer perspective.
Business perspective
- These open source projects provide business value to
end user customers. Because the community development process
enforces modularity and standards compliance, these projects yield
high dividends and provide significant value for businesses and
governments.
- These open source projects represent areas where one or
more significant commercial software vendor has taken an
active sponsorship role and where there is solid overall support.
And the rewards are increasingly clear. Commercial software
vendors recognize the opportunity to amortize collective
investment into commoditized layers in the software stack.
Moreover, commercial software vendors believe they can disrupt
competitive control points such as critical interfaces or software
stack components, eliminate vendor lock-in, and support multiple
platforms. This is especially true of Linux.
- Critical skills to support ongoing foundation projects
are readily available in the software development community. These
skills come from the hacker2
community, from the consumers of the technology, from companies
with complimentary business models, from commercial software
vendors, and from academia. All of these skill sources are fed by
academic institutions that use OSS code to teach computer science
concepts. Consequently, there is an educated population of
programmers emerging out of colleges and universities who are
familiar with the open source environment and with the
technologies being built in open source projects.
- Long-term plans for improvements (design, development,
test, documentation, etc). The increasing number of conferences,
commercial interest, and worldwide collaboration regarding the
future of open source computing is a strong indication of its
maturity and reveals the degree of importance associated with it.
Developer perspective
- Passionate interest in developing and enhancing code.
These projects make for a highly visible "artistic canvas" for
programmers to demonstrate their skills and technique. Some
developers participate, at least in part, to establish a
reputation and build credentials to interest potential employers.
- Significant overlap between sets of users and
developers. The direct participation of users and developers
in the use of open standards and open source software leads to
rapid incorporation of domain requirements into the code base and
a significant degree of project focus on business oriented as well
as technical problems. This focus supports the relevancy and value
of the project's output and subsequently the health of community
participation.
- Diverse, interactive community. The sheer volume and
the many diverse perspectives of project participants leads to
rapid rate of innovation, optimization, and bug fixing.
- Strong overall project/code leadership. A strong
leadership style of the open source "maintainer" ( the person in
charge of deciding what goes in and what stays out of any
particular release) is essential. Linus Torvalds, the creator of
the Linux operating kernel, is a great example of this leadership.
Strong leadership promotes focus and momentum and generally helps
keep the project moving in the right direction. This success
factor, like many others becomes circular and self promoting. The
important successful projects attract strong leadership and the
strong leadership in turn promotes the health of the project.
The foundation projects mentioned above are healthy and appear to
be sustainable.
Involvement of major industry players
The second factor, involvement of major industry players toward
viable OSS solutions, is also significant. Linux, Eclipse, Mozilla,
Globus, and Apache all have active participation and support from
some of the largest and most influential software companies in the
industry. The Linux community counts HP, IBM, Sun, and Oracle among
its active contributors. Members of the Eclipse community include
Borland, IBM, Oracle, Sybase, Montavista, and Red Hat, and many
others. Mozilla has participation by Netscape, AOL, IBM, Red Hat,
and Sun. Globus is sponsored by IBM, Microsoft, and CISCO. Apache
lists Apple, IBM, Sun, CollabNet, and Red Hat among its active
contributors. These lists are, of course, small samples of the large
number of companies that are involved in these initiatives. Their
members also include contributors from Brown University,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and many
other academic institutions.
Why are major software companies increasingly interested in open
standards and the open source movement? Primarily because investing
in these communities makes good business sense, for three major
reasons:
- Drive rapid adoption of open standards. Those companies
that have made a strategic decisions to back open standards and
whose business model is based on widespread adoption of open
standards support open source projects to help business and
governments get ready access to high-quality, open source
implementations of open standards and speed industry adoption.
- Use OSS as a strategic business tool. OSS can eliminate
competitor "lock-in," create a competitive playing field, and open
up new business opportunities. Vendors who support OSS make money
on OSS services, as well as through the sale of components based
on open source platforms. And their customer base is satisfied by
the ability to extend their systems via additional components and
services from alternative vendors, as needed. OSS can effectively
"level the playing field" by removing many of the structural
advantages that a company controlling proprietary control points
may have.
- Extend mindshare. Active participation in an open
source community can enhance partnership relationships and help
build relationships with a broad spectrum of developers.
The importance of the participation of these commercial software
vendors in the advance of OSS adoption can not be understated. These
companies provide a critical mass of highly skilled programming
expertise and core competence. The involvement of these companies
provides stability to open source communities and reassurance to
consumers of the technology as to its long-term viability. The
technical resources these companies provide can kick start an open
source community and provide critical technical and domain expertise
as well. For example, the donations of the Netscape code base to
Mozilla by AOL and the Eclipse framework to the Eclipse Project by
IBM have enabled two new OSS movements over the past three years. In
addition, the financial resources of these companies can fund
critical government standards compliance testing. A recent example
of this is Oracle's and IBM's announcing their commitment ? likely
to mean millions of dollars ? to get Linux certified to meet US
government security standards.
Challenges for middleware OSS projects
Middleware OSS represents a potential opportunity to many
entrepreneurs ? typically small companies seeking to develop
alternatives to commercial middleware technology. And as we know,
opportunity invites competition, and competition drives innovation.
Some middleware OSS projects may migrate into the foundation efforts
and be picked up by those communities. We have already seen basic
application server functions migrating into the Apache project. This
function will be very useful to many business and governments and
will likely be used widely in the near future.
However, middleware OSS projects have not yet had much impact in
the enterprise space nor have they had much impact in the mid market
space. For a variety of reasons, they do not share the
characteristics that have made the foundation projects successful,
including the critical mass of a healthy and sustainable community,
or the support of major vendors.
More importantly, middleware projects currently lack enterprise
features and characteristics of commercial alternatives such as
scalability, reliability, enterprise support, multiple languages,
robust documentation, and integrated tooling. Compared to the OSS
foundation level projects, which have attracted support from major
software vendors, it has also proven to be difficult for middleware
OSS communities to raise the funds required to purchase testing
tools and do government standards compliance testing. Security is
another significant concern. The architecture of commercial
offerings typically address security in ways that OSS middleware
projects cannot. The mid market is dominated by ISVs who develop
industry solutions that require many "enterprise' characteristics
for software they either imbed or require as prerequisite.
The commercial application server vendors are rapidly innovating
and creating function that allows them to competitively
differentiate their products and resist commoditization due to
high-value capabilities such as portals, business processes
integration, automation, nationalization, and other strengths. The
middleware market will continue to evolve and very likely be
characterized by high rates of innovation.
A quick note about licensing
There are many arguments that go back and forth about the role
that licensing plays in the potential success of OSS projects. In
the extreme, some industry players have referred to OSS licenses as
"cancer." In my opinion, arguments over licensing are overblown. OSS
projects use various types of licensing ranging, from a very
flexible BSD (Berkley Software Distribution) type license which has
no obligations other than publication of copyright notice and
sometimes an attribution requirement, to a GPL (GNU General Public
License) which requires source code for modifications that you
distribute to be made available under GPL. Some have suggested that
this restriction limits intellectual property rights and have
characterized it as "viral." But note: the requirement to provide
source code for modifications only applies if you intend to
redistribute the code outside of your organization. To an end user,
the requirement to provide source code changes is not very
important.
There is considerable experience in the industry working with the
various OSS licenses. There is a general consensus that for the most
part these licenses do not represent a barrier to the integration of
OSS into business solutions and will likely have little, if any,
impact on the success of OSS one way or the other.
What is driving open computing, open standards, and open source
success?
The reasons for the success of open computing and open standards
are obvious. They are a necessary feature of a networked world, and
they are essential to the critical business factors of flexibility
and business agility.
However, the explanation for the popularity of open source
software is a little less clear. As we've discussed, not all OSS
projects are created equal, and not all have been successful in the
market or have the potential to be successful in the market. In
fact, in the grand scheme of things, only a small number of OSS
projects fall into this category. There are some general reasons why
businesses and governments look to OSS and some specific reasons why
they are looking at the foundation projects, especially Linux, in
particular.
General benefits
In general, businesses and governments see value in the following
OSS features:
- Flexibility to modify. Some businesses or governments
require specialized modifications to a code base to accommodate
specific business or technical requirements. OSS offers this
flexibility. The National Security Agency (NSA) has done just this
and created a secure version of Linux
- Cost effectiveness. OSS often has some attractive
up-front cost advantages, although there is much debate as to the
total cost of ownership (TCO). There is anecdotal evidence that
some companies have realized considerable license savings. On the
other hand, it is argued that scarcity of skills translates to
higher support and maintenance costs that nullify the up-front
cost advantage. The economic case will vary from geography to
geography as the availability of skill and labor rates vary.
Unfortunately, there is no clear data on the total cost of
ownership of OSS vs. commercial software yet.
Specific benefits: the case for Linux
In the specific case of the foundation projects, and especially
in the particular case of Linux, businesses and governments see
value in:
- Multiplatform support. Some businesses and governments
have realized advantages in deploying a common operating
environment across multiple hardware platform architectures. They
also see some advantage in being able to scale their applications
beyond the confines of one particular hardware architecture. Linux
for example is available on systems ranging from cell phones to
super computers. An enterprise might deploy an application on an
Intel platform, then need to scale the application to midrange
systems such as IBM's pSeries, Sun's SPARC family, or even to
IBM's mainframe zSeries systems. There may be other reasons to
move platforms such as reliability, manageability, corporate or
departmental mergers, security requirements, or the exploitation
of some specialized capability. This kind of flexibility allows
businesses and governments to match their IT support to their
business requirements and have that IT support change as the
business requirements change.
- Standards enforcement/promotion. Standards compliance
is a natural and inevitable characteristic of community developed
software. So some businesses and governments have decided to use
OSS as a means of promoting or enforcing open standards and open
computing. Implementing Linux or Apache for example implies the
implementation of many of the most important Internet standards.
Strict standards adherence at the lower foundation layers allows
permits considerable flexibility of configuration and of choice of
application and vendor.
- Auditability/Security. Some businesses and governments
believe that being able to see the underlying mechanics of code
enhances their confidence in the reliability and security of that
code. While this transparency argument does make aesthetic sense
and many cite it as a rationale for selecting OSS alternatives,
there isn't any hard data to suggest that OSS is inherently any
more secure or stable than commercial software. Linux offers the
best case due to its maturity, the involvement of major software
vendors, and the sheer volume of reviewers ? all of which means
that bugs and security holes are discovered and patched very
quickly. On the other hand, in many domains it is quite clear that
the commercial alternatives are both more reliable and more secure
owing to their architecture and the quality control measures that
many commercial vendors enforce. Without question, security needs
to be designed into a program, and a program's security needs to
be assessed on a case by case basis. In any case, the platform
foundation layer of the software stack is where most of this
scrutiny is focused.
- Linux as an agent of economic development. This
situation is specific to governments and to the case of Linux and
occurs typically in developing countries. Governments are using
their purchasing power and influence in the economy to create a
critical mass of demand to stimulate the development of local
skills and local business activity around the ecosystem that
evolves around an OSS platform. The hope is to stimulate a
domestic software industry. We even see governments sponsoring the
establishment of Linux competency centers to accelerate Linux
adoption and to act as a focal point for skill development and
investment.
Conclusion
Open computing, open standards, open source software, and
commercial software which implements open standards are all
succeeding because they are enablers of technological evolution and
because businesses and governments recognize value in them.
Businesses and governments will strive to attain the flexibility and
business agility of the on demand world. Open computing platforms ?
both hardware and software ? are essential underpinnings of the
journey towards on demand computing. The role that standards have
played in the evolution of e-business has been well established. The
role that open standards will play as part of the open
commercial and open source projects that embrace those standards is
central to the further evolution of e-business toward more
responsive, focused, and resilient e-business capability.
Businesses and governments are embracing open computing, open
standards, and some open source projects. IBM has made the strategic
decision to embrace these concepts and is aligning its hardware,
software, and services business to support its customers on the
journey toward on demand.
Notes
1 Generally speaking, "software
stack" refers to the complete array of software ? from the
operating system, through the middleware layer, to various specific
components ? used to accomplish a specific business goal; for
example, the assemblage of software designed for a financial
services solution.
2 The word "hacker", in this
context, is used by its original meaning. Originally, "hacker"
referred to a person who is highly skilled and interested in
computers and not a person engaged in criminal mischief.
About the author | 
| | Douglas Heintzman is Director of Technical Strategy for IBM Software Group. In this capacity he has responsibility for coordinating the overall technical strategy for Software Group as well as specific responsibility in the areas of government standards compliance, Linux, and open source.
His previous position was Manager of Business Strategy and Standards in IBM’s Pervasive Computing division. In this capacity he was responsible for strategic direction and competitive analysis for the PvC division.
He has represented IBM on various international standards and specifications bodies and was Director and Chairman of the Board of the SyncML initiative. In the past 12 years Doug has held various positions in consultancy, sales and marketing, and technical engineering with IBM in both Canada and the US. Douglas holds a Masters in International Economic and Social Administration from the University of Grenoble, France, and a BAH in Political Studies from Queens University at Kingston, Ontario, Canada. |
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