The adoption of open source in enterprise computing is as inevitable as the overall trend toward the commoditization of commercial computing hardware and software, which is clearly evident in the large data centers supporting the big Web companies. Enterprise IT environments pre-dating the Web are working hard to catch up, and increasing the adoption of open source is one way that they are doing so.
In 1951, the first year of enterprise computing, there were two applications, period: one in the US and one in the UK. Most businesses were still operating using paper and pencil, three-part carbon forms, index cards, large form accounting ledger books, etc. It is hard to imagine what it must have been like in those days.
These first enterprise applications were, in fact, dedicated applications running on hardware and software specifically designed for them. It would be thirty years before anyone developed a hardware independent operating system, which was another significant step toward commoditization.
In the early days, no one really knew what general purpose computing was, never mind what it would be like building systems out of commodity software components. As more and more applications were developed, however, it became clear what features and functions were needed from an operating system, database management system, application server, IDE, Web server, messaging system, and so on.
Large Web businesses such as Google, eBay, Amazon, PayPal, and others have proven that commodity data centers and commoditized open source software are capable of handling the most challenging IT requirements. Enterprise IT environments that predate the Web are rushing to catch up.
The initial trend toward enterprise computing was driven by the high return on investment of automating a manual business process, and the corresponding ability of the commercial computing vendors to invest heavily in developing new features and products to enable the automation of more and more manual processes.
At a certain point, however (perhaps 10 or 20 years ago), the initial innovation wave peaked and became a game of diminishing returns, as automation became widespread and it became clear what general computing was, and the features and functions necessary to support it. In other words, once the markets for proprietary hardware and software became saturated, it became clear what features and functions were needed, and the balance started to tip from innovation toward commoditization – in large part through open source software.
Richard Stallman began the trend that would eventually result in the widespread adoption of open source when he began to develop a free version of Unix (free as in unfettered, and free for users to control). The term “open source” was defined in conjunction with another important milestone, the release of Netscape/Mozilla as an open source project. Finally, when Linus Torvals completed Stallman’s work by developing the Linux kernel, the open source development model was proven, and other widely successful projects soon followed, such as the Apache Web Server and the Eclipse IDE suite.
The trend toward commoditization of commercial software through open source has become a challenge for many independent software companies. As the markets for their products saturate, margins fall, and the value equation shifts. The wave of consolidation of many commercial software vendors is a clear indication of the trend toward open source, and the fact that the industry now knows what software features and functions are necessary to support commercial computing.
During the past decade, open source projects have steadily taken market share and replaced commercial products, such as JBoss for Java EE application servers, ActiveMQ for message brokers, Camel for integration brokers, Hadoop for data warehousing/data analytics, just to name a few examples.
My experience tells me that the trend to open source is an inevitable part of the IT industry maturity and commoditization cycle, and we will start to see enterprise IT environments following the lead of the large Web sites toward commodity hardware and open source software for improved price performance, flexibility, and control.
