Open-Source Obligations

Computerworld - Someone in the open-source community should send a nice bottle of champagne to Charlie Ward, manager of technical architecture at Duke Power. What's worth celebrating? The way Ward and his crew of developers poured 1,000 hours into building aframework to support application development on Microsoft's .Net technology, then turned their work over to the open-source community ("Utility to Make IT Framework Open-Source," QuickLink 48960).
What made this front-page news for us last week was the significant size, relative rarity and potential impact of this corporate embrace of open-source. It's one thing for developers to turn over a few sanctioned pieces of corporate code to their open-source playmates. It's quite another for a major utility to throw open the doors to the results of a costly, complex software project.
Open-source just climbed up another rung on the enterprise ladder.
"This is somewhat of an experiment to see how much value can be gained from the open-source community," Ward said. Building a framework for application development doesn't give an energy company any particular competitive advantage, he observed, but getting continued support and improvements donated by a dedicated community of developers is clearly a benefit.
The appeal of open-source is rolling rapidly across the corporate landscape. More than 60% of 140 companies surveyed this spring by Forrester Research said they were either using or planning to use open-source products -- everything from databases and development tools to Web servers and desktop software. And now the feds are officially encouraging open-source adoption across all government agencies.
"Open-source is just a more efficient, effective software business model," says John Roberts, founder of SugarCRM, one of the first open-source business application companies to attract venture funding. "It's more than just cheaper software. It's a shift, a movement reshaping the dynamics of a modern software company."

I think he's right about those fundamental shifts, which are also changing -- and further complicating -- the landscape of software licensing. For example, even at companies where open-source products aren't in evidence yet, the lines of responsibility are blurring as vendors fold portions of open-source code into their own proprietary products.
One CTO I spoke with last week had just encountered a novel situation with a new software package from a major vendor. His developers found a flaw in the code and alerted the vendor, which denied responsibility, saying that the piece of code containing the flaw was open-source. The customer argued for the fix and ultimately got it -- but the experience raised a red flag for the CTO.