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Citrix, ICA, Program Neighborhood, MetaFrame, WinFrame, VideoFrame, and MultiWin are trademarks or registered trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. 2 ContentS Questions Answered in This Booklet. 6 The Dimensions of an Open Source Adoption Strategy . 7 What Is Open Source? . 8 Perspectives on Open Source . 9 Where Does Open Source Come From? . 10 How Is Open Source Different? . 11 The Productization Gap in Open Source Software. 12 The Productization of Open Source. 13 Forms of Open Source Productization. 14 Putting Open Source to Work . 15 Three Categories of Opportunities. 17 Infrastructure and Operations . 17 Software Development. 19 Applications . 20 Partner Pages . 21 Hewlett-Packard. 22 IBM . 24 Novell. 26 3 Open source software has never been more ready for use in the In most industries, waiting is no longer an option. Ignoring the enterprise. With Linux leading the way, a diverse parade of soft- opportunity to incorporate open source into your environment ware has marched from the open source community Web sites to enhance commercial offerings, to reduce costs, and to gain directly into the largest data centers in the world. Today companies access to valuable new tools and applications means leaving money like Novell, IBM, Hewlett-Packard (HP), SAP, and others support on the table. In this booklet, we describe practical ways you can Linux and most common open source software as an ordinary put open source to work. However, rushing ahead and installing course of business. Developers and end users alike have many any sort of open source software without a coherent strategy and attractive open source programs to meet their needs. Now the plan to manage the risks and responsibilities is not a viable option key question on the mind of most IT professionals is this: What either. Use of open source software is not an all-or-nothing propo- am I getting myself into when I use open source software? sition. There is a continuum of adoption from using as much as possible to using only the most mature forms of open source Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this question. The to using none at all. For most companies, success in using open right answer for your company depends on choices you must source means combining elements of commercial enterprise make about the level of skill that you want to maintain and the software and the most mature open source software to create an models for support that you are comfortable with. When open environment that offers the best of both worlds with lower costs source first became credible for enterprise use, many companies than any other path. Of course, chances are that your organiza- were uncomfortable about the unique features of open source tion is already relying on open source software for parts of your licenses. These fears, promoted in some cases by opponents of IT infrastructure or applications. open source, have been largely overcome. From a strategic perspective, utilizing open source provides an opportunity to free up money for innovation and differentiation. Bruce Perens, a pioneer of open source who wrote one of the early definitions of the concept, put it this way: “. to make your business more desirable to customers, you should spend more on differentiating software that makes your business more desir able. Open source is the key to spending less on nondifferen tiators.”1 1. Bruce Perens, “The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source” (Cyber Security Policy Research Institute, George Washington University, 2005), http://perens.com/Articles/Economic.html. 4 To successfully use open source, you must become skilled at understanding the productization gap for the software you intend The key to making open source work is understanding to use and the way the open source functionality will fit into that in most cases open source software has powerful your existing environment. The size of the gap differs from project functionality that is only partially productized, meaning to project. It is small in the most mature projects like Linux for which there are lots of companies selling consulting and support that all of the mechanisms provided by enterprise services to close the gap. Linux is productized, for instance, by software vendors such as documentation, installation Novell and Red Hat with enterprise-level support, documentation, scripts, configuration mechanisms, and support and services, just as customers would expect from non–open services may or may not exist. We call this difference source software companies. Open source software makes economic the productization gap.2 sense because the cost of closing the gap is lower than the costs of commercial alternatives. For most open source software, how- ever, you must take responsibility for closing that gap either by developing and maintaining skills internally or by purchasing services from a third-party provider. This booklet is a guide to understanding and closing the productization gap so that you can successfully put open source to work. 2. The idea of the productization gap was introduced in Open Source for the Enterprise by Dan Woods and Gautam Guliani (O’Reilly Media, 2005). 5 QueStiOnS AnSWered in thiS BOOklet how can i put open source to work? What strategies will work best? This booklet aims to prepare you to recognize the different types of open source projects in the marketplace so that you can evaluate whether they are ready for enterprise use at your company. To do this, we cover all the questions below and then detail the specific ways of using open source that are likely to be most benefi cial. See “Putting Open Source to Work,” a section that identifies specific opportunities. What is open source and where did it come from? how is open source different? We take a condensed tour of the history of open source, from its roots in the We analyze the unique character of open source by looking at its progression free software movement to the first large-scale success ful projects like Apache from the first generation, which was created by communities of developers and Linux to commercial con ver sions like Eclipse and youthful enterprise ap- for their own use, to each successive generation of open source, which has plications and service offerings like SugarCRM and SpikeSource. improved the producti za tion. Despite this progress, open source remains fundamentally different from commercial enterprise software. See “What Is Open Source?” See “How Is Open Source Different?” how is open source being productized? how can open source be applied? We examine the many forms of open source productization. Fundamental The amount of fully productized open source available is greater than ever infrastructure has been productized through distri­­bution services such as those before. We make specific recommendations for applying open source in the available for Linux. Some commercial software that had been fully productized following three categories: has been converted to open source. Some open source projects have been • Infrastructure and operations converted into fully realized products. Services have been created to supply • Software development productized support for integrated stacks. Understanding the level of producti- • Applications zation of an open source project is the key to rapid assessment of its potential value to you. We review the most common use cases, the level of productization of the software, and the business value.