It is quite astounding to see how many proprietary software vendors have come out now claiming their products are Open Source.
If you walk back down memory lane, some of those very same vendors made fun of Open Source software not too long ago (including myself when I was at IBM, but I won’t mention that). It’s OK though, everyone has a right to learn and grow at their own speed.
Whereas it’s quite clear why it’s great to do ‘Open Source’, consumers need to be aware of some nuances of Open Source Software (OSS), as it can impact ROI, speed of innovation and can even mean lock-in. Plus it’s where your missing innovation budget might be hiding.
Below are some aspects to consider when choosing your OSS stack and provider:
| What? | Why is this important? |
| Project VS Product | Understand the difference between Open Source Software (OSS) projects versus product. A project is driven by the community, it’s the latest and greatest. An OSS provider should take the OSS project and make it enterprise ready, security harden it, ensure backwards compatibility, do testing and convert it into a supported OSS product and release bug/security fixes and put enhancements back into the OSS project. An OSS vendor fully supports an Open Source product, whereas an Open Source project is supported by the community on a best-effort basis. Enterprises usually need a fully supported product and can’t rely on a best-effort support. |
| Enterprise Readiness | Does the Open Source product provider understand ‘Enterprise Readiness’ such as 24×7 support, offer extended lifecycle support (ELS), patching, upgrades, updates, security response team with quick fix time SLAs, training, mentoring and Professional / Consulting Service offerings, a rich partner ecosystem and certified hardware and software stacks? If any of above are non-existent you need to question as to why and ascertain whether the OSS provider offers solutions you can rely on to run business critical functions. |
| Product components | Are all product components open sourced or do specific components (eg connectors, add-ons, plug-ins) which you require, need a proprietary license to run? What happens if the license expires? Can you reboot and the software will still be running after the license has expired? |
| Upstream First | Does the open source software product provider give the fixes back to the community project? By doing so the community version will be in alignment with the product. Not doing so is basically forking and the power of community powered innovation gets lost as the community will produce a different, non-compatible version. Any vendor who does not contribute enhancements back into the upstream project is not open source. Open Source is about give and take, not giving back to the community is just take. |
| Stability VS Latest Features | Does the Open Source Software provider guarantee backwards compatibility, migration paths or is there a risk of being forced to upgrade and re-engineer your business applications because the latest feature release is not backwards compatible? From a business perspective you want to be in charge when deciding when to upgrade and you should prefer a OSS provider who understands why stability is more important than the latest hype or feature. |
| Support life-cycle | How long is the OSS providers’ support lifecycle – 1 year, 3 years, 10 years? You don’t want to be forced to upgrade every 1, 2 or 3 years because bug fixes are only available in the latest version. |
| Community viability | In that instance size does matter. How large is the community behind an OSS project? Is the community perhaps just the vendor staff or is there a real non-vendor funded community driving the project innovations? How active is the community? What’s the commit frequency? How mature is the community behind a project?
If there is no real community behind an OSS project you are losing out on true community innovation power with slower innovation and bug-fix cycles than your competitor who uses a product which is based on large OSS community projects. This can affect your business innovation speed. |
| Project direction | Is the project taking on established industry trends and standards such as packaging formats (eg Docker), patterns (eg EAI), platforms (PaaS/CaaS) or orchestration frameworks (Kubernetes)? This will determine whether your investments in the OSS product are paying off in the mid/long term future. Remember innovation happens way faster than ever before and is accelerating. |
| Ecosystem / stack support | Does your OSS provider have other offerings up and down the software layer stack? Good News if they do, as it allows you to have a strategic partner you can work with and who understands your business, instead of calling many different vendors/service providers to get a production issue fixed, and none of them understanding the impact on your business or worse finger pointing and saying ‘not our fault’. |
| Subscriptions VS Licensing | Do you need a license for your OSS product to run or is the subscription you buy merely to access the OSS providers auxiliary services such as updates, patching, security fixes, support etc? This is important because requiring a license to run a OSS product is similar to a vendor lock-in you get with a proprietary software vendor. A subscription in the contrary does not lock you in and you are free to move anytime. Longer license terms (eg 3 to 5 years) also significantly affect the accounting and potentially the OPEX / CAPEX classification of your software assets depending on your industry specific accounting rules.
A subscription is deemed a services, and as such is classified as OPEX. A license on the other hand is considered CAPEX. This is an important distinction, since your organisation may find itself under considerable CAPEX pressure, while the ability to reduce your fixed OPEX costs through the strategic deployment of OSS subscriptions could result in some significant cost-savings. This is where your missing budget for innovation can come from. |
I hope that helps to select the right partnerships in the Open Source space to make your business thrive in the Digital Economy.
Please let me know if you want different aspects added.
Andreas
All Things Architecture 