The days when open source was regarded as geek paradise or freeware are becoming fond memories. Already enterprises are talking about application centric solutions on open standards; IT managers are evaluating open source applications for redundancy and reliability. For example, Novatium Solutions opted to build its entire infrastructure on Novell’s Open Source solutions. “We looked at various operating system and software alternatives that had some, but not all, of the elements we needed. We found that the combination of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Novell eDirectory was able to provide enterprise-class scalability and integrated user authentication, management and security,” says Vinod Gopinath, Chief Technology Officer, Novatium.

Expanding Role
According to a recent global survey on the expanding role of open source software in the enterprise conducted by Forrester Consulting for Unisys, more than 79 percent of the IT decision makers interviewed reported using open source in the application infrastructure – databases, Web servers and application servers – which provides the underpinning for both routine and mission-critical applications.
However, Avnesh Jain, Senior Systems Manager, Hero Honda Motors feels that it is still early days for open source applications. “I feel getting good service support is extremely crucial,” he explains. For IT heads, service level agreement is a decisive element in understanding the total cost of ownership, and open source applications cannot be an exception because more than the technology, it is the management of the set up that keeps them busy.
In fact, in the aforementioned Unisys-Forrester Consulting survey, respondents expressed concern about the availability of consulting, integration, support and other services for open source software. More than two thirds of the respondents expected the following services from their open source service provider:

• Open source software maintenance (83 percent)
  
• Life cycle support (80 percent)
  
• Consulting services (77 percent)
  
• Integration of multiple open source software components (76 percent)
  
• Integration of open source and proprietary (or “closed source”) software (74 percent)
  
• Open source application development (72 percent)
  

There are issues too within the open source community. In a press note issued in September 2007, Gartner analysts Brian Prentice and Mark Driver pointed out that open source software users must demand the right to modify and redistribute the software code and the resulting products, as vendors start to fight over the true meaning, purpose and spirit of open source.
"Vendors increasingly want to tweak the meaning of open source to include, for example, attribution licensing, which says the user can modify and re-distribute the software and make derivative versions based on it only if they give the author credit," said Prentice. "But ‘open source’ is simply a licensing agreement that allows unfettered modification and redistribution of software code. In fact, it is both a key sign of a healthy open source community and a key benefit to users."
According to Gartner, the current debate amongst open source vendors is about reconciling an inherent incompatibility. "The incompatibility is not with the commercialization of open source software, but rather between open source and traditional industry business models designed to achieve single-vendor dominance of products or technical standards," said Prentice. They recommend that users must demand a strict definition of open source linked to the modification and redistribution of code and products, otherwise uncertainty around vendors' claims could make sourcing and architectural decisions for open source software more difficult.