It's All About Freedom
A debate often heard among FOSS evangelists across the world, is that using software is about "free as in freedom, not free as in beer". The libre vs. gratis argument rings no less true for some of the richest corporations in the world. I was recently at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco and I was struck by the sheer number of Fortune 500 corporations talking about their adoption of open source and explaining why they've signed onto the movement. Heavy duty roll-outs of open source software in the financial industry reveal that adoption of open source is all about the user having control over what they do with the technology and how and when they do it.
E*Trade Performs Flawlessly
A keynote by Lee Thompson, Chief Technologist for E*Trade, highlighted the deep penetration of open source software in critical services of the financial giants. From 2002, Linux has helped E*Trade increase its performance by dramatically giving it an edge over competitors like Ameritrade and Schwab. This was graphically illustrated when, on February 27, 2007, the DOW dropped 400 points. E*Trade's open source technology infrastructure scaled better than their competitors' and handled flawlessly the emergency spike in online trading.
H&R Block Delivers New Services Faster
Another major organization, H&R Block talked about how its adoption of open source has been all about performance and flexibility. Marc West, CIO of H&R Block explained how open source enabled his company to meet short time-to-market deadlines. Open source has given him the power to leverage rapid innovation and stay ahead of the curve.
"Among the largest and most advanced corporations, freedom and control are the top drivers for the adoption of open source."
Bank of America has Choice
Tim Golden, SVP at Bank of America (BOA) emphasized that banking on open source has given them the power of choice – to select a variety of technologies to build and roll-out applications that best suit their needs for performance, service availability, and reliability. Corporations like BOA have invested heavily in expertise and infrastructure within their organizational framework to realize the benefits from open source software and processes.
Freedom to Control, Freedom to Share
A couple of weeks later, at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit held at Google, the same themes of freedom and control were reiterated. Many large users, including Motorola, Dell and Google, explained that they could never have done what they did if they had had to wait for an external vendor to provide them with the capabilities they required. So for these large-scale, cutting edge technology users, the most important reason to adopt open source was the control they achieved over the basic technology they use. With open source, they have an unlimited ability to take and shape already powerful technologies in ways that specifically benefit them. And for many of the things they don't need to customize, they can still leverage the resources and talents of a global panorama of collaborators.
In order to take open source to the next level and get even more power out of it, many of these top open source users are saying it is time to focus on open standards such as data formats, accessibility, sound and the all-important GUI. Standards provide the frameworks and guidance for continuing collaboration and can bring the fruits of super-fast innovation to a greater number of users. Among the largest and most advanced corporations and organizations, freedom and control are still the top drivers for the adoption of open source. But the big players are also saying now it's time for open standards to pave the super-highway for sustaining the revolution.
It's all about freedom: freedom to control, freedom to share, and freedom to build the open standards needed to protect the future of freedom.
© Technetra. First published July 2007 in LinuxForYou magazine (www.linuxforu.com).
