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 Bill Vass, president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems Federal, Inc. and the chief technology officer of Sun’s Global Accounts and Industry Organization provided his take of the top six benefits of open source software at Solutions Developers’ May WFED Technology Leadership Breakfast. He makes a few references to his blog, which can be found here: http://blogs.sun.com/bvass/
Since I’m such an open source groupie, you can rightly conclude I agreed with all that Vass had to say. Confirmed. But he definitely made an even stronger believer out of me with several points he made, mostly about security. I'll also share how the Society of American Florists (SAF) has leveraged open source as testimony to each of the benefits - mostly in the backend of our IT operation. SAF plans on expanding our use of open source into the desktop environment. We’re in the process of testing Open Office to replace Microsoft Office installations on both PCs and Macs and plan on replacing the venerable XP operating systems with Ubuntu installations.
Here are the six benefits as presented by Vass:
Better Security
Vass proclaimed open source is seven times less risky to run based on third-party data posted on his blog. The reason he states why much of the proprietary software is not as secure stems from the simple fact much of it is written overseas in Russia, India and China. He suggested much could be written into the code that could pass onto the end-user unchecked.
He equates open source as a “Trojan horse made of glass” where the open source model is designed for transparency – nothing can be hidden. As a plus, the code is then usually pored over by countless developers to check for errors. He makes a great point despite being compromised much less than proprietary software, open source applications have a greater deployment across the enterprise.
Much of our operation at SAF (about 70 percent) is based on open source software, however, cost of implementation was the primary driver. In retrospect, security has been rock solid over the past six years. On the border, we use IPCop as our Web filter and proxy, SpamAssassin to filter mail and monitor the network using Nagios.
Vass blogs about OS security here: http://blogs.sun.com/BVass/entry/the_no_1_reason_to
Procurement Speed
Vass simply stated that open source is “download and go.” And that you can then procure support after installation, if you must. We can certainly vouch for this statement. In almost every open source deployment, we were able to download the latest version and deploy in a few days after testing. Also, in the five years we’ve installed open source solutions, we’ve only had to tap support once. Otherwise, to find a solution, we'd "google" it.
Quality of Code
Referring back to the open, volunteer developer model, Vass says open source code is pored over an average three times more than proprietary code. And usually, those heading up the open source projects take great precautions prior to releases to ensure the code will stand up to the scrutiny of fellow developers. In other words, open source coders take lots of pride in their work, which reflect, in the quality of product.
Cost
Vass says open source is 90 percent function at 10 percent of the cost. This is my favorite benefit of OS. Over the years, SAF replaced Microsoft Exchange with an open source mail and calendar system, replaced IIS with a Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP stack (LAMP), swapped out Cold Fusion for an open source content management system (CMS) – Mambo and replaced our expensive firewall devices with open source IPCop running on cheap PCs. CHA-ching . . . you can certainly do the math and add up the savings!
Community
Since open source licensing requires programmers who modify and improve the code to submit changes back to the community, Vass says this process allows the community to actively engage with the product which results in continual innovation. As this community builds he adds, software stands on a solid foundation of development and support.
Multiple vendors
Quite simply, Vass says with open source, you are never locked in to any one vendor. In fact, as projects grow and more vendors customize open source for particular markets, your choice in open source solutions grows. He says this results in product longetivity.
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