Would You Like Your Open Source All the Way?

Open source is no stranger to the enterprise, but most businesses compartmentalize -- open source for this, proprietary software for that. Is some of each the best of both worlds, or could businesses benefit by taking the 100 percent open source plunge? IDC's Michael Fauscette and Red Hat's Tim Yeaton kick around some of the issues surrounding full open source adoption in the enterprise.

The enterprise software industry today can be compared to the menus offered at fast-food eateries. Some offer their star item only one way. Others let you have it your way.

Tim Yeaton, SVP of the Infrastructure Group at Red Hat

How much choice you have often determines where you do your eating. The same option -- or lack of it -- is the driving principal behind attracting and keeping enterprise customers paying for open source product support.

Even when businesses funded their own code solutions, the freedom to build it your way or buy it somebody else's way was a critical choice. Now those times are changing.

Blended Family

Open source software once was compiled in purity to offer program users a choice other than proprietary products. Today's rush to a changing market may be pushing software developers to capitalize on using open source as prefabricated code -- in small or large chunks. A growing trend shows software developers incorporating free code into programs marketed as proprietary packages.

So, is open source gaining as a business model in its own right or morphing into proprietary products? There are some signs that enterprise IT is gearing up for more adoption of open source technology. However, there also are indications of a growing complacency with mixing the two. Many businesses settle for sharing the computing load by running certain tasks with open source packages and using proprietary products for other computing processes.

Michael Fauscette, GVP of Software Business Solutions at IDC

Can companies venture beyond a divided list of tasks handled by both closed and open source deployments to commit 100 percent to open source? Tim Yeaton, the senior vice president of the infrastructure group at Red Hat, suggests that the movement to convert from proprietary software is already well established in business. Enterprise is involved in a massive change of perspective in applying more than just coding to corporate computing solutions.

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Would You Like Your Open Source All the Way?