Dr. Dobb's Journal December, 2004
If you've been even marginally awake the past few months, you'd think that strange bedfellows pop up only in politics. But that's clearly not the case, and you don't have to look far for confirmation. For instance, what's with doctors claiming video games make better surgeons (http://www.gamerdad.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=226&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0)? Or the Electronic Frontier Foundation teaming up with John Ashcroft against an online bookseller who gave free e-mail accounts, then snooped into messages Amazon.com sent to users (http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/US_v_Councilman/20040902_Councilman_Brief.pdf)? And for criminy sakes, a book entitled Strange Bedfellows: Sex and Science Fiction? Uhh, I think I'll leave that one to Michael Swaine's cousin Corbett. But dollar-for-dollar, the biggest cuddle-up involves Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, helped along by the nearly $2 billion Microsoft ponied up for patent exchanges and "other considerations." Hedging its bets, Sun is also sidling up to Fujitsu, and the two companies will be merging their Sparc-based server offerings by the middle of 2006.
That said, the most unlikely pair of bedfellows is still IBM and the open-source community. Perhaps more so than any other organization, IBM symbolizes corporate America. And perhaps more so than any other community, open-source software proponents symbolize freedom of expression and will. Okay, I admit that's a bit lofty, but you can't deny that the two could intersect and thrive in one of the world's most competitive markets is, well, pretty amazing.
Of course, cynics might claim that what's good for open source might be bad for Microsoft, hence IBM's $1 billion investment in Linux in 2001. But at the same time, what's good for open source has proven good for IBM, which sold more than $2 billion in Linux-related hardware and services in 2003.
Starting with its 1998 breakthrough announcement that it would sell and support Apache as part of its WebSphere suite, IBM has continued to pile on open-source projects. While projects such as Eclipse and Cloudscape have garnered headlines, dozens of other open-source projects ranging from device drivers to debugging tools have found their way into developer's toolkits (http://www-136.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/).
Other buttoned-down companies are also well-placed in open source. Hewlett-Packard, for instance, has dozens of open-source projects, ranging from filesystems to Semantic Web toolkits (http://www.opensource.hp.com/opensource_projects.html). And don't forget it was HP engineer Martin Pool who received the Australian Open Source Award for his work on the distcc distributed compiler (for more on distcc, see "Distributed Compilation," by Vadim Zaliva, DDJ, November 2004).
For its part, Microsoft is grudgingly climbing on the open-source bandwagon. For instance, it recently contributed its Windows Installer XML (http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix/), C++ Windows Template Library (http://sourceforge.net/projects/wtl), and FlexWiki collaboration application (http://sourceforge.net/projects/flexwiki/) to SourceForge.
No matter who the players are, it's getting more and more difficult for organizations of any size to "just say no" to the open-source phenomenon. In its June 2004 survey, Netcraft discovered that out of more than 51 million web sites, about 67 percent were Apache based, while 21 percent were Microsoft based, and 3 percent Sun. Likewise, Evans Data (as reported by David Wheeler; http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html) found that 1.1 million programmers in North America are working on open-source projects. According to Wheeler, Evans Data also reported that market share for the open-source MySQL database is growing 30 percent per year, compared to 6 percent for Microsoft's SQL Server and Access databases.
Cost savings, of course, are part of the attraction of free software, although what with support, training, system administration, and the like, open source isn't necessarily free. Still, as Cybersource (http://www.cyber.com.au/) points out (and Wheeler reports), an organization with 100 users might pay $136,734 for a Microsoft solution, while only $80 for an equivalent GNU/Linux solution. But dollars and cents aren't everything. The common-sense "many eyes make all bugs shallow" approach (coined by Eric Raymond) is also part of the attraction. Admittedly, this doesn't mean that open source is bug free, but it does suggest that open source has the potential to be as robust, reliable, and secure—if not more so—than proprietary software.
When it comes to what's best for software development, the truth of the matter is probably somewhere in between open and closed source. There will always be some tools and applications that are proprietary and should remain so—just as there should and will be open-source alternatives.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief