Open Source

Last year felt the uncertainty with open source when SCO

filed a case against use of patented code in the Linux (a premier open source

operating system). With the uncertainty and doubts settling down, this year

started with a positive proclaim from IDC saying “Linux is now mainstream”

(by the analyst Al Gillen). Further, the uncertainty is almost ending with a

statement from OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) saying “Patent Threat to

Linux is Receding”, made in November, this year. 

The customary Microsoft vs Linux/Open Source TCO (Total

Cost of Ownership) studies continued without any impact (either positive or

negative) to the growth of open source. This year saw open source started being

adopted by Governments and lots of open source alternatives to commercial

products sprucing up. Below is a brief jot down of some of the happenings to

Open Source products/projects this year and what is in store for the coming

year, 2006.

Open Source in Governments



Lots of action has happened and going to happen here. The low cost and

non-proprietary model of open source should have always attracted governments

and NGOs. It is this year that more than a couple of governments across the

world adopted or started adopting open source.



Indonesia



announced the IGOS (Indonesia Goes Open Source) project last year. Under this

project, this year,



Indonesia



's Ministry of Research and Technology announced that it will implement a Java

Desktop System (JDS), based on Linux and Open Source, as a national-standard

desktop, designed for its own culture.

Followed by the famous Linux migration plan of



Munich



city(announced last year),



Mannheim



(another German city) has announced its plan to migrate to Linux. They also

plan to eventually migrate to OpenOffice (an open source office suite) to

replace MS Office products which are used currently.  The



Munich



migration plan itself got delayed till the next year. .

Brazil



's federal data processing agency Serpro  expects to complete its own

migration to open-source software the end of this year.

Back at home, in



India



, C-DAC and the Ministry for Communications & Information Technology

released a CD called “Hindi Software Tools” which consists of many open

source software like Firefox, Gaim and OpenOffice.org in Hindi. Besides this,

United Nations in



India



has started an initiative to migrate their community mailing lists (for AIDS,

health, decentralization, education and other such topics)  called Solution

Exchange, based on a proprietary product, to an open source solution. The new

solution will consists of an open source mailing list as well as web based

discussion, integrated with each other.

To sum up, the coming year should see some real success

stories on the above migration attempts  embracing the adoption of open

source to other governments,  especially in the developing countries.

Commercial going Open Source



This year saw the trend of many commercial companies open sourcing their

closed source or proprietary products. Akiva released its collaboration solution

(which is said to functionally compete with Microsoft Sharepoint and IBM

Workspace) as an open source project called Silk. The aim was as obvious as

involving a larger (all from across the globe) group of developers to improve

the product.

RedHat went the commercial way with RedHat Enterprise Linux

long back. But they left a strong ground for community involvement known as

Fedora Core project — an open source, license free, Linux distribution. Today

the cutting edge (thanks to the community involvement) Fedora Core project

shapes the upcoming releases of RedHat Enterprise Linux. It all became a

successful business model, with RedHat today, being one of the fastest growing

and the top 50 tech companies in

Asia

(declared by ZDNet Asia, towards the end of this year).

Perhaps, the same business model also encouraged SuSE

(acquired by Novel). SuSE is known to be one of the  novice friendly Linux

distributions.

Novell  released the distribution's code to the

community and  OpenSUSE 10 (www.opensuse.org) made its debut this year.

Few more examples are those of of Alfresco (www.alfresco.org), an open source

content management system and Zimbra (www.zimbra.com), a web-based e-mail and

collaboration package.

Last but not the least, Sun Microsystems open sourced parts

of its Solaris operating system this year and made the source code available at

opensolaris.org.

Note that all these companies are still selling commercial

products based on the open source products with add-ons like support and a few

proprietary goodies.

The gist is, this year has seen a new business model being

adopted by several vendors and the coming year should see more and more

commercial vendors catching up with this model. The end user benefits from

getting a solid, license free and feature rich product which is a summation of

community involvement plus the vested efforts and interest of the commercial

company.

For developers, this year



This year saw some new and much awaited release of open source products. The

much awaited release of MySQL, version 5.0, was released this October. MySQL has

been a very popular open source RDBMS but lacked features readily available in

other enterprise grade databases like stored procedures and triggers. The 5.0

release of MySQL, which is ready for production use, fills this gap, making

MySQL ready for more adoption by Enterprises and developers. 

A developer coming from Windows background would have

always missed a Visual Basic like RAD (Rapid Application Development) on Linux.

For those who missed the RAD as well as the language, Gambas (http://gambas.sourceforge.net/)

for Linux  is an excelled alternative.

Gambas had been there for more than two years. But it is

only this year that version 1.0 (a stable release) of Gambas was released.

Gambas provides an IDE which allows you to build a graphical application by

dragging-n-dropping components onto a form. And you can use a Basic like

language to write the code behind.

Along with PHP 4 and PHP 5, PHP 5.1 beta 1 also got

released. The notable feature of the new release is PDO (PHP Data Objects) which

is a database abstraction library similar to ADODB.

This year also gave good news to PHP developers and those

who have been doubting the advantages of PHP over Java or .Net. Web browser

pioneer Marc Andreessen said that “PHP will be more popular than Java for

building web-based applications”. Same month, Zend (the company behind the PHP

engine) announced the PHP Collaboration Project. A Zend PHP Framework will be



developed under this project which will bring to PHP a  robust and standard

web application framework similar to that for Java and .NET.

This year, the winds seem to be moving in favor of open

source developers. They now have a VB like RAD for Linux, a database with

enterprise grade features and will soon have a framework  for web

applications. All this is pointing to an easier,



feature rich and standard based project



development with open source tools, in the coming years.

Conclusions







Compared to yesteryears open source now seems to be more free-as in free

from patents, free from uncertainty, free from doubts to adopt it. The greatest

happening is commercial companies open sourcing their products which leaves us

with possibilities to see more and better, enterprise grade, open source

solutions. Governments' adoption of open source may mean an entirely new

curriculum in education (like it happened in Kerala) and need for new skill sets

in the public sector, resulting in more employment opportunities.