The "urge to customize" extends to open-source software as well as vehicles
Red Hat
Open source software is like a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, said Merry Beekman, public sector marketing manager of Red Hat. Nobody owns a stock Harley -- owners add extras and personalize them. That's "modifying the source code," she said.
Beekman said there are over 50,000 open source projects or packages being developed at any given time. Red Hat sponsors the free open source Linux distribution called Fedora. Open source developers of projects like Fedora are constantly weeding out which packages to include in their project and which to disregard. Though Red Hat sponsors Fedora, all changes must be approved by its open-source developers before they are officially part of the distribution. After changes have been approved, made, and tested in Fedora, those changes can possibly be made in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Open source changes the way some software companies do business, said Beekman. Instead of selling licenses to software, open source companies give the software away and sell the support and maintenance for that software -- changing the pricing model from selling a product to selling a service. Support includes tech support, bug fixes, patches, upgrades, intellectual indemnity, etc.
Patrick Daniels, Novell network and systems management, said Novell announced in 2003 it would pursue open source. Novell made its existing products run on Linux and turned some proprietary systems into open source software. Novell acquired SuSE Linux, the second top commercial distribution of Linux in the world, which is number one in Europe.
Through history various new disruptive technologies have changed how things were done, said Daniels. Thin-slab continuous casting changed the steel business. Hydraulic systems replaced steam shovels, digital media changed entertainment, and the computer replaced the typewriter. Each disruptive technology marked an advancement in technology.
Open source's disruption -- the open collaborative process -- has gone beyond the software, he explained. New open collaborative projects are developing that are not dedicated to developing software. Wikipedia -- a free online encyclopedia created and maintained by a community of volunteers -- is an example. Anybody can contribute and help create the encyclopedia. Wiktionary, a wiki dictionary and wikibooks, are other examples.
Novell's employees were fully migrated to the open source OpenOffice in the summer of 2004, and Daniels estimates that move has saved the company about $2.4 million. He said he hasn't needed to use advanced features such as found in Excel, but people in Finance may have missed it. He said OpenOffice is under development and will be adding features.
By fall of 2004, 50 percent of Novell employees had dual boots on their desktop computers -- one boot for Windows and one boot for Linux. This spring 30 percent have Linux exclusively, and Novell expects 80 percent of its employees to have Linux exclusively on their desktop computers by this winter.
Scalix
Bill Freedman, manager of product marketing for Scalix, said that the software is free but the people in an organization are not, so the cost savings of open-source software can be invested in technical personnel.
Freedman said that when migrating to a Linux e-mail system, get the old and the new systems running at the same time and then gradually migrate data to the Linux system.
Thomas Whaley, a database programmer for the city of Atascadero, Calif., and a session attendee, said that he was interested in open source because of its low cost and because it is highly customizable.
