InformationWeek

senior IT executive at a major West Coast bank scoffs at the notion of using open-source software. She recites a litany of fears: It's unsafe and unreliable; it won't fly with government regulators; and it lacks a support infrastructure. However, her fears are unfounded--and the odds are actually quite high that her bank already deploys open-source software as part of its Internet infrastructure. She just isn't aware of it yet.

The growth of Linux has thrown the spotlight on open-source software. Linux, the most talked about open-source product today, is a PC-based version of the Unix operating system.

Linux server shipments grew more than 24% last year, according to International Data Corp. Some analysts predict Linux will account for almost half of all business servers by 2004. The widespread adoption of the Apache Web server, Sendmail, and Perl scripting language--all open-source products--further illustrate the inroads open-source software has made in large companies.

Apache represents 60% of the HTTP Web servers on the Internet, while Sendmail accounts for 40% of the SMTP E-mail servers on the Internet, says Jean-Christophe Cimetriere, CEO of TechMetrix Research, a technology consulting firm. It would be difficult to find a company active on the Internet that doesn't have some open-source products in place.

Although a growing number of brick-and-mortar companies such as Kinko's, Plantronics, and the Raychem division of Tyco are adopting open-source products, many business IT executives appear to be unaware of the growing acceptance of such products--or they're just plain in denial.

Despite the success of open-source products such as Linux and Apache, these IT managers continue to hold a number of misconceptions about open source. To them, open source comes from the fringe of the Internet, where free-everything zealots run amok. Some of these managers believe that anything free can't be any good. Another popular notion is that open-source software is riddled with back doors, allowing hackers easy entry into systems that run open-source applications.

Open source understandably raises concerns about support, accountability, and viability. It upsets commonly held ideas about licensing and turns the conventional software-value proposition on its head. Who, IT managers may wonder, does one hold accountable for a problem with Linux?

Open-source software, also referred to as free software, is a confusing concept that, indeed, flies in the face of everything business IT executives have learned about software development, licensing, value, and quality. At the simplest level, open source refers to software that's delivered with unrestricted access to its source code. Even before anyone adopts a product, people can look at the source code and are free to modify it.

Open source typically is provided under a license; the GNU Public License (GPL) is the most common, but there are other open-source licenses that offer slightly different terms, such as BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and Artistic license, which covers Perl.

The open-source license generally grants the right to run the program, own a copy of the program's source code, modify the program's source code, and distribute copies of the programs you build using the open-source code. The only thing you usually can't do is fold an open-source program into a program you're licensing under a proprietary license.

Whatever a person builds using open-source software, he or she must provide the same capabilities to anyone else under the same open-source license terms. The differences between the various open-source licenses typically have to do with scope and constraints of software usage.

Open-source software is free in the sense of freedom to access the source code and do with it whatever you want, within the constraints of the particular open-source license. While you don't pay for the open-source code itself--the code must be available for the asking--you'll likely pay for the packaging of the code, support, documentation, training, and a host of other items that accompany the source code.

For example, Red Hat Linux, the most popular Linux distribution on the market, must let users download a copy of the software for free. But if you want Red Hat Linux neatly packaged on a CD with documentation and an easy installation routine, you have to pay for it. Start tacking on support contracts from Red Hat or other Linux support providers such as IBM, and "the price can easily jump from zero to $1,000," says Rex Ballard, an independent enterprise information system architect in Gillette, N.J. But even with a support contract, open-source software generally is far less expensive than conventional, proprietary software, the cost of which can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, Ballard says.

"We charge what's called a software fee," explains Bonnie Crater, president of Zelerate Inc. The San Mateo, Calif., company offers an open-source E-commerce package under the GNU Public License. As such, Zelerate can't charge a license fee for the source code. Instead, its software fee covers things such as support and warranty.

Although open source has been around in various guises for two decades or more, the open-source phenomenon first began attracting attention with the success of Linux. Eric Raymond, an early contributor to GNU and developer of Fetchmail, an open-source product, characterized Linux development as "release early and often, delegate everything you can, and be open to the point of promiscuity," in what amounts to a seemingly unfettered bazaar.

The Linux phenomenon provided a stark contrast to the classic IT approach to software, which Raymond describes as reverent, highly controlled cathedral-building in his 1997 paper, The Cathedral And The Bazaar.