Organizational adoption of open source software: barriers and remedies

Introduction

Perhaps the business case for adopting open source software is an easy sell. After all, the software is free, and can be simply downloaded from the Internet and installed or customized as needed. Organizations interested in reducing the licensing fees of proprietary software, while also avoiding the penalties and legal liabilities associated with their illegal use, can definitely consider open source software a plausible alternative. However, less obvious than the cost savings but equally important are the barriers ("hidden costs") of adopting open source software.

Open source software has created considerable excitement in the business world over the last decade. These applications, designed by groups of volunteer software developers, have the potential to break the current dominance of proprietary software and restrictive licenses for many business applications, reduce software development time and improve software quality, and most importantly, bring much needed software applications within the reach of individuals and small businesses, who cannot otherwise afford such software. Further, unlike proprietary software, open source software applications make their source code available for free, which can be customized to fit the unique needs of specific organizations.

Many organizations have caught on to open source software and realized significant cost savings in technology expenditure as a result. For instance, Cendant Travel Distribution Services replaced a $100 million mainframe system with a $2.5 million system running on 144 Linux servers. Amazon.com cut its technology expenditure from $71 million to $54 million by switching to open source applications. Sabre Holdings saved tens of millions of dollars by adopting MySQL, an open source database product. Though the basic open source software is free, the prospect of paid ancillary products and services such as hardware and consulting has motivated many erstwhile proprietary technology vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems to embrace open source software and offer value-added services based on such software.

Table 1 shows an estimated range of the current global market share of several of today's open source software applications. This table shows that though the open source market is large and growing for some application domains such as Web server (such as Apache), server operating systems (such as Linux Server), database server (such as MySQL), electronic mail client (such as Sendmail), and Internet browser (such as Firefox), it is lagging behind its proprietary counterparts in other domains such as client operating systems (such as Linux Workstation), office productivity software (such as OpenOffice), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. This pattern suggests that there may be significant barriers to open source software adoption among some sectors of the user populations.

It is widely believed that proprietary software vendors often use fear, uncertainty and doubt to undermine and cut the market potential of their open source competitors. The objective of this paper is to reduce that uncertainty via a candid discussion of the barriers confronting open source software adoption and potential remedies to those barriers. These barriers and their remedies, summarized in Table 2, are discussed in detail.