The E-Business Software Weekly is a series profiling trends and developments in software and applications that support e-business, the Internet, and other electronic communication channels. Look for a new story each week in this space.
The Fourth Revolution
Corporate computing is in the midst of its fourth revolution in less than two decades--a revolution whose effects, while perhaps less visible than those of its predecessors, have the potential to be just as profound.
First came the personal computing revolution of the early 1980s, a move that ended mainframe computing's stranglehold on the corporate desktop and swept away its servant army of display terminals with their Orwellian uniformity and limited application sets. In their place arrived powerful PCs and workstations that granted workers an unprecedented freedom of customization, choice, and capability.
By the end of the 1980s, powerful PCs had become mobile, making it possible for employees, once more or less chained to their desks, to work wherever they happened to be, increasing the productivity of the workforce even as it boosted job satisfaction. And then, a few years later, the Internet emerged from the scientific shadows, its transformational impact on corporate computing too well-known to rehearse.
But now comes a movement just as rooted in the rarefied world of technologists and programmers as the Internet once was. It is a movement that, while germinating for years, burst to life fewer than four years ago, and yet has already caused most of the major computing companies to stop in their tracks and, in some cases, to turn about completely.
The revolution? It goes by the simple, even disarming, name of "open computing."
Entrepreneurial Freedom
If the open computing movement has a godfather, it is Eric S. Raymond, the computer programmer whose essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," presented at the 1997 Linux Kongress, brazenly challenged the conventional notions of "closed-source" code development. Expanding on the theme in his 1999 book of the same name, Raymond predicted that "the eventual destiny of any [closed-source] software technology will be to either die or become part of the open infrastructure."
The core of Raymond's argument is that "open-source" development--computer languages and programs in which the underlying "source code" is made public--is both more effective and more cost-efficient than "closed-source" development, the traditional process in which the computer code is kept proprietary and secret. A quietly radical concept, the open-source philosophy seems to strike at the very heart of conventional research and development, which has depended since the dawn of the industrial age on staunchly guarded trade secrets and vigorous protection of intellectual property rights.
But others don't see the entrepreneurial equation quite that way. Robert F. Young, Chairman and CEO of Red Hat, Inc., a leading developer of Linux (an open-source form of UNIX), believes that open-source development and entrepreneurial freedom go hand-in-hand. Compare the speed of innovation in the computer software and hardware industries. "In the computer software industry," he writes, "change is measured in decades." The office suite, for example, "the 1980s killer application, wasn't challenged until the 1990s with the introduction of the web browser and server."
In computer hardware, on the other hand, "freedom reigns for both suppliers and consumers alike," allowing the industry to generate "the fastest innovation in product and customer value the world has ever seen." And that is mere prelude to what lies ahead. Open-source development, Young asserts, "brings to the computer software industry even greater freedom than the hardware manufacturers and consumers have enjoyed."
The Open Source "Process"
Open-source development is the antithesis of the highly structured development environments that typify closed-source programming and application creation. In projects of the latter type, system architects work for weeks or months to construct the project's programming framework, after which closely managed teams of developers operate in precisely defined roles to fill out the framework's details.
Open-source development, by contrast, is a "process" only in the loosest sense. Working from a core code base, the open-source community of programmers adds bits and pieces of code over time, with these contributions eventually aggregating--despite the relatively unmanaged environment--into a rich collection of computing functionality.
The business case for open-source development relies on three main economic propositions. The first is that open-source development has the potential to take place more quickly than closed-source development, and therefore to provide a larger base of usable code over time. Indeed, because the Internet has made cooperation so inexpensive and because the cadre of Linux programmers has become so large, some argue that Linux now boasts more programming depth than any of the world's other computing languages, including Windows.
Second, through public posting of its code, open-source development enables users to enhance a code set merely by replacing the sub-optimal components rather than having to write an entirely new program or operating system. And instead of rewriting these components from scratch, developers need only modify the existing source code, resulting in still greater efficiencies. The result: less programming time is devoted to "reinventing the wheel" and more to building new and better "wheels," increasing the power and reducing the cost of software throughout the economy.
Finally, open-source development can actually improve the quality of the code through specialization and more robust quality control. Because of the community-oriented nature of open-source development, programmers work only in areas of their particular interest and expertise, without the often unrealistic deadlines imposed in more structured computing environments, leading potentially to cleaner, higher quality code. The developer community also serves as an its own global QA department, a "bug squad" far larger than anything proprietary development efforts can match.
A Proliferation of Open Source
A closed-source patriot might dismiss such hypotheses as mere speculations. After all, they might say, the proof is in the market.
So let's turn to the market, and see what the users of software and operating systems themselves--who stand to gain or lose the most from open-source development--are saying.
Exhibit 1. With an annual growth rate in shipments of 24.4%, according to IDC, Linux is now the fastest growing server operating environment, with a market share second only to Windows.
Exhibit 2. Apache, an open-source web server that was created and continues to evolve without any structured development environment, now commands more than 60% of the web server market.
To see the lure of open-source development, however, one need not look even this far. The Internet itself has been the largest open-source development in history. Controlled by no one, managed by nothing more than an open set of standards, the Internet has revolutionized corporate communications and computing operations like nothing that preceded it.
Could Linux, Apache, and other open-source software developments do the same?
At this early stage, only time will tell. But the history of the three most recent computing revolutions suggests that this fourth revolution could be very transformational indeed. We'll explore its possibilities in a later column.
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