How open source delivers for government

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Amid the well-deserved hype around the impact of cloud technology and big data analytics, it is possible that casual industry watchers may have missed the real story behind the recent wave of IT re-architecting.

Enabling many of these recent, powerful trends is a newly validated embrace of open source software technology. The movement to OSS solutions is empowering system designers and solution architects to re-examine methodologies that evolved out of the legacy proprietary, closed source software license model. Put simply, OSS allows developers of IT systems to create better results and cut costs.

Enterprise IT leaders in business and government have taken notice of the benefits of OSS. For example, the recently launched U.S. Digital Service published a Digital Services Playbook that urges agencies to "consider open source software solutions at all layers of the stack." The General Services Administration extended this thinking in the recently introduced Open Source First policy as part of its effort to modernize its organization, processes and technologies. Defense policy makers have gone further, directing those within the Department of Defense to identify barriers to the effective use of OSS within the DoD so that the military can continue to increase those benefits.

Better Outcomes

One of the key drivers of OSS adoption has been cost. But while the savings can be dramatic, cost reduction is not the whole story. OSS also creates the possibility of more reliable, more trustable, more functionally appropriate, and just plain better solutions.

Historically, companies needed to factor in the cost of closed source software at peak license distribution even if they routinely needed a smaller number of licenses. On top of that were support fees tied to the peak distribution. Solution designers had an incentive to constrain distribution of software even if the use case was under-served.

This is clearly not so in an open source world. Both the solution architect and budget manager need only to consider the support costs, not licensing costs; and outside vendor support is generally more cost effective than internal capability. In the case of a distributed database solution, the difference in cost can really add up.

A simple example of how the move toward OSS can improve IT architecture is by thinking about database backups. In the legacy regime of licensed closed source software, each license of an incremental database came with a cost -- often a steep cost. In the world of OSS, enterprise users are able to maintain replicas of databases as backups with no incremental license cost. The more copies of the database software you have, the more options you have when things go wrong. The more copies of the data management or analytics software you have, the more choices you have to efficiently move your data around.

Security and Reliability

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How open source delivers for government