Developing Open-Source Business Policies That Work

Among the concerns that Young plans to address are:

• What is the formal organization behind the open-source entity? Are they organized? Are they a one-man show? "I prefer the more organized [approach] where 'donations' can be made for support of source," says Young.
• What is the release schedule for source code?
• Does the open-source project have a life that makes sense? Like more than one month or one year? "I would prefer three to five years at least," says Young, "since some of the development is a balance-sheet item."
• Is there a maintenance/support plan for the open-source project? Points out Young, "Once you deploy open source into your enterprise you have to keep up with operating system, hardware configuration changes, database changes and the like."

After all, as Young observes, for all open-source benefits, "If the project dies, guess who's left holding the bag? Me!" That's a position no CIO ever wants to be in.

On a larger scale, Roger Valade, vice president of technology for Entertainment, the company behind the Entertainment Book marketing program, says the company has effectively adopted a number of open-source components, "providing both significant cost savings and environmental standardization." Entertainment's open-source philosophy is purely practical: "Our policy right now is 'use it whenever you can-it is a productivity improvement. Don't code what you can download.' Sometimes we have battles (Hibernate vs. iBatis) [Both are services to make it easier for programmers to connect objects with database queries] and that is when it gets interesting."

In the future, Entertainment plans on refining its open-source strategy by developing a policy that considers such things as existing skill set, availability of training, availability and cost of outside resources, strength of the user community and appropriate cost model. Says Valade, "To a large degree this is a subset of the portfolio management initiative with a specific focus on open source given both its popularity, subtlety and long-term impact."

John Rafuse, executive VP at HeavyLifters Network, a Canadian-based business and IT consulting firm, would agree with Valade. Rafuse sees open-source software management as being "exactly the same as controlling any software asset." To track HeavyLifter's software use, Rafuse uses the open-source program The Verified Software Repository. Closed or open, Rafuse believes that companies can save huge amounts of time and money by using a shared repository. If they don't, he says, "I saw in one instance that they had built no less than 12 case management systems instead of having a central code base and manipulating it for their needs."

Several other people CIO spoke with made the same point: Open-source software isn't a special case, and overall software management is what's really key to any enterprise. In particular, several mentioned Spiceworks, another open-source software inventory and management program, as being quite helpful in cutting costs and helping bring management order to software use.