Space Coast Interactive -- Our Web Philosophy

Open Source Technology Is the Future

Across the globe and across industries, the financial meltdown is taking its toll on anyone running a business - multinational, regional or local. The pressure to cut and consolidate has never been higher. That is why it is critical to examine all of the options out there - for not only saving dollars today, but for positioning your company for growth and opportunity in the long run.

One of these options is Open Source technology.

Open Source Software (OSS) is defined as computer software for which the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that meets the Open Source Definition or that is in the public domain. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified forms. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner.

Open Source code powers a majority of Web sites on the Internet. Nine of the Top 10 Web Hosts are powered by Open Source servers, databases and code. Open Source technology has matured in recent years, and much of the code is reliable and continuously updated by tens of thousands of Web developers throughout the world.

Research firm Gartner projects that by 2012, 90% of the world's companies will be using Open Source software - globally. Already, Open Source technology powers some of the world's most innovative companies such as Amazon, Google, Nokia and Sun Microsystems.

At Space Coast Interactive, our mindset, methodology, processes, tools and code is based on the latest, proven Open Source technologies. Open Source provides us the ability to develop truly rich Websites, complete with slick Web 2.0 animations and effects, and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) for our clients at a fraction of the cost of 'closed' or proprietary technologies. This is where Space Coast Interactive shines. The company was founded to leverage free-use licensed Open Source technology to meet the needs of business owners and managers for their Web-based projects.

Why? Open Source is experiencing explosive growth: the proliferation of projects hosted on SourceForge, the major Open Source code repository, demonstrates the progress of this revolutionary form of software. Growing at a compound rate of 55%, the number of projects hosted by the site has grown from around 12,500 in 2000 to nearly 200,000 by year-end 2007. (See Chart 1 for cumulative yearly project totals.)

Likewise, the adoption of Open Source has been dramatic. Viewing the yearly download totals at SourceForge illustrates how many people are accessing Open Source. Over the past seven years, download totals have increased over 7,000 percent and total yearly downloads will certainly reach one billion this year or next (this yearly download total actually understates the total number of project downloads, as Sourceforge is mirrored to a number of other sites and mirror downloads are not included in the numbers cited here). Chart 2 illustrates the growth curve of SourceForge yearly download totals.

It's easy to see why Open Source is so popular. Low cost, easy access, expansive license terms—all of these give open source a compelling value proposition. Open Source serves as the foundation for Web 2.0 companies like Facebook and YouTube. And it powers most SaaS companies like Salesforce and NetSuite. Open Source technology provides:

• Lower Cost

• Flexibility & Freedom

• Broad Support & Reliability

• Data & Application Security

• Quick Implementation

Most current Open Source projects is available free of royalties and fees. From a business perspective the purchase cost of software is only one factor; total cost of ownership (TCO) is what really matters. Other things being equal, the solution with lowest TCO is usually the most desirable one. Open Source software:

• Typically has no purchase price
• Offers less need to account for copies in use, reducing administrative overhead
• Provides a reduced need for regular upgrades (lower upgrade fees, lower management costs)
• Offer longer uptimes and reduced need for expensive systems administrators
• Lower vulnerability to viruses, security breaches and hack attacks reducing systems administration load

Some will argue that proprietary solutions are more reliable and stable. Reliability is a loose term. Broadly, we can take it to mean the absence of defects which cause incorrect operation, data loss or sudden failures, perhaps what many people would mean when they use the term `bug'.

The pattern with closed-source software is typically that a defect report needs to be filed and then there will be a delay before the vendor determines when or whether to issue an updated release. Users of the software are much more at the mercy of the vendor's internal processes than with the Open Source arrangement.

In the Open Source world, severe defects tend to be fixed within hours of their being detected, a process which is undoubtedly assisted by the availability of the source code. Able developers who discover a bug will commonly fix it and then report it to the maintainers as well as issuing an updated version of the software on their own authority.

Open source software developers volunteer their time and expertise, and are coordinated by fewer paid programmers. The lower overhead costs translates into substantial savings, as does the fact that open source software typically does not have a per-seat licensing cost. According to Gartner, open source is even more attractive to businesses during tough economic times. In its 2009 enterprise software spending forecast, the industry analyst predicts that enterprises seeking to cut costs will be drawn to open source software, virtualization technologies and, because of tighter travel budgets, unified messaging and collaboration technologies.

• Open Source developers are motivated by pride and peer recognition rather than a development plan supplied by the marketing department. Most want to use the software themselves and they prefer robustnesss before adding features.
• Open Source developers are likely to consider it a ‘win’ if they can reduce the complexity and improve the maintainability of software. This rarely comes high on the product plan for commercial software.
• Where several developers work in parallel, the best-of-crop solution can be chosen in place of the only solution (as would be typical for a commercial product).

In a business context, software flexibility is about being able to choose solutions suitable for the needs of the users. Many commercial software products will claim flexibility as a built-in feature and some will undoubtedly be correct. Our view is that that flexibility should really mean business flexibility, so that as requirements in the business change, solutions should not be unreasonably constrained by software. In particular, we view this as being especially important in the area of infrastructure components — the architecture of the IT solution rather than any one package.

To obtain flexibility at the architectural level, experience shows that it is often best to pick tried and trusted standards for interworking. If that is done, then best-of breed solutions can be selected for particular components within the architecture. Provided that the solutions can interwork suitably, the business should be able to avoid lock-in to a particular supplier and over-dependency. This is notoriously hard to manage, requiring a real act of will from management. What happens most often is that a vendor will make a `feature sale', emphasizing something which cannot be done through the standard infrastructure. If they succeed then the business can become dependent on that particular solution and unable to choose alternatives at a later date. Any astute vendor will attempt to do this, only vigilant managers can avoid the lock-in that follows. Proprietary data formats are a particularly good tool for vendors to use. If they can establish a bridgehead, their competition will not only have to provide competing functionality, but also data conversion tools from a (typically) undocumented or even protected format.

Open Source projects have very little motivation to attempt this kind of lock-in strategy. Since there is no commercial benefit to be had, adherence to de-jure or de-facto standards (where they exist) is typically high. Where standards for interworking do not exist, the fact that the source code is published means that proprietary data formats can't be used to manipulate lock-in. This at least partly explains the relative success of Open Source software in infrastructure areas. Open-source software can be tailored for the way you do business. It is usually within the resources of all but the smallest companies to modify Open Source software to suit their own needs.

• Apache and MySQL are arguably the most reliable Web-based software available
• There is great incentive for Open Source developers to produce reliable software
• Where source code is freely published and widely distributed, the users of the product will often discover and correct defects themselves.
• All users of Open Source products have access to the source code and debugging tools, and hence often suggest both bug fixes and enhancements as actual changes to the source code. Consequently the quality of software produced by the Open Source community sometimes exceeds that produced by purely commercial organizations.

In a business environment software is mostly a necessary evil, a tool to do a job. Unless the job changes or more efficient processes are discovered then there is rarely pressure or need to alter the software that is being used to assist the task. This is more or less directly counter to what motivates software vendors who are in the unenviable position of supplying a commodity that does not wear out or age much. The vendors need a stable revenue stream to be able to keep their business going whilst their customers have not the slightest desire to change or upgrade any product that is working well enough to suit their needs. If a software supplier can establish a virtual monopoly and then force upgrades onto its audience (as has been the history of the software industry since the mid 1960s) then the profits can be very high.

Software vendors can apply a number of tactics to persuade their customers to upgrade more or less willingly. Typical tactics include moving to allegedly new and improved file formats (which require the new and improved software to read them) or to withdraw support and bug fixes for older versions after a short period. The problem for users of the software is that they rarely have much control over that process and are left isolated if they choose to remain with older versions that they consider to be acceptable. This has cost and control implications for the business.

Open Source Software is not a panacea in the world of ever-changing software, but the worst effects of vendor-push can be mitigated. The way that Open Source products tend to conform closely to standards efforts has an inertial effect, since standards change but slowly and interchange formats are often particularly stable. As a result, incompatible file formats can be less of an issue. If they are standards-based then they typically aren't an issue at all, and if they are formats unique to the software product — proprietary formats in a sense - then they cannot be undocumented since the source code that uses them is itself published. In practice the track record of Open Source projects is usually good; when incompatible formats are used it is commonplace for a converter program to be shipped with them which will upgrade data to the new format.

In the real world, no business is static and software changes to meet new requirements. A choice to use Open Source software can provide a counter to the pressures to upgrade for the vendor's commercial purposes but cannot shelter every user from any change. Having access to the source code can allow a business to choose to support itself on an old version where necessary and we believe that in general it gives more options and choice to the users. Nonetheless, some upgrading and maintenance effort will always be needed. Putting the choice in the hands of the users rather than the suppliers is hard to criticize.

Open source is peer reviewed software, which leads to more reliability. The infrastructure of the Internet is largely composed of open-source programs such as DNS, sendmail, Apache and languages such as HTML, JavaScript and PHP. They have proven to be both reliable and robust under the most strenuous conditions, namely the fast growth of the Internet.

Benefit 4. Data and Application Security

Security: Open Source enables anyone to examine software for security flaws. The continuous and broad peer-review enabled by publicly available source code improves security through the identification and elimination of defects that might otherwise be missed. Gartner for example, recommends the Open Source Apache Web server as a more secure alternative to closed source Internet Information servers. The availability of source code also facilitates in-depth security reviews and audits by government customers.

With Open Source software consumers needn't wait years to deploy a solution. Open source software can be “test driven” prior to procurement, and is particularly suitable for inter-agency collaboration, rapid prototyping and experimentation. There are multiple reasons why Open Source development tends to be faster:

• Large libraries of code, Content Management Systems and tools are readily available at no cost
• Thousands of ready-built themes are available at little or no cost
• A majority of Open Source code is dynamically typed rather than statically typed
• Most Internet-based Open-Source applications do not need to be compiled
• There are a large number of Open Source contributors that develop quickly because they are self-motivated