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May Open Source Be With You!


BY DEBASHISH CHAKRABARTY


 

Open source reduces the importance of products and raises that of services, the sector where India's strength lies. Open source thus has an assured future in India; it suits our business model and is good for our economy too. 



This Star-wars has left lot of sparkles. The open-source jehadis, who consider Microsoft as an evil-empire, were very content with the recent verdict in the anti-trust case in favour of Sun. As if this were not enough a research firm predicted that the growing popularity of Linux would force Microsoft to bring its software to the Unix clone starting in late 2004. By 2006 or 2007, Linux will run on 45% of new servers, Meta Group predicted. That popularity, Meta said, will lead Microsoft to offer Linux support for its server software. The software titan, which has no love for Linux technology and its open-source philosophical underpinnings, quickly dashed water on the report. 

Despite of what they say, the Redmond based giant evidently takes Linux (and thus open source) very seriously; CEO Steve Ballmar is on records acknowledging Linux as a serious competitor; Gates himself made a hefty $400 million investment in India during his November visit last year, obviously concerned about the official leaning of India towards Linux. 

There can be a debate on how true Meta's prediction can be but it certainly brings open source into limelight. Open source software has long been used in Asia and there are ample reasons why companies are migrating towards them. There are some who are against licensing, proprietary software and Microsoft's monopoly and thus wanted an alternative. For some it provides leverage for negotiating price with Microsoft, others are seeking more control of their destiny. But the major factor here is off course price. 

In Open Source Software the source code is freely distributed, and it's illegal to renovate them into proprietary software. This makes it possible for anybody to enrich the code by adding new features and removing the bugs without reinventing the wheel. While this brings down the cost of development it also prevents hidden trapdoors to be introduced. (I learnt that MS Windows once had a "feature" to crash a PC if underlying software was from a competitor). 

Today the paradigm of open source is not confined to Linux alone. Infact, the impact of Open Source has already been so huge that we take it all for granted. Consider HTML, Java, Perl, Tomcat, Apache (which has a dominant market share), Netscape and MySQL; these open source implementations have already gained ground. A lot of Web sites are built almost completely with these e.g. mp3.com; others, like Yahoo and Amazon, employ them heavily. Even Oracle has found its new love in Linux terming it as cheaper, faster and more stable than any other environment around. Many organizations including mine are planning to run on Linux OS while migrating to higher versions of Oracle.

How does then Open Source software affect India? One thing is evident, with the price of software dropping to zero IT solutions can be made available at much lower costs. This will certainly speed up our economic growth. Software companies fostering open source experience will certainly have an upper hand in terms of expertise compared to the ones relying on "cars that have their bonnets welded shut". Up till the use of Open Source software it was very hard for entrants to break in since firms like Oracle and Microsoft with their entrenched products earned higher profit margins. This is because open source reduces the importance of products and raises that of services, the sector where India's strength lies. This suits India well because companies here have never based their business strategies on monopolistic products.

Open source thus has an assured future in India, if your organization hasn't been using such software there are strong chances that they will very soon. It suits our business model and is good for our economy too. For the software Lukes in India thus I can't avoid wishing - May the Open source be with you!

***

Author's Note: This piece originally appeared in my column 'Reality Bytes' in issue dated 13 January 2003 of the Free Press Journal, an English daily published from Indore, India. 

©2003 Debashish Chakrabarty. The article can not be copied, distributed, excerpted, reviewed without the written permission of the author.

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