A few months ago, a Gartner report, The State of Open Source 2008, mentioned: “By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use Open Source in direct or embedded forms.” The report added: “Open Source is a phenomenon with a broad impact. Chances are, if you do not think you use it, then you use it; and if you think you do use it, then you use lots more of it than you know.”

Why is Open Source becoming so pervasive? The reason is that we are now entering an era of Collaborative Innovation. Open Source Software (OSS) is the leading example of this trend, but the Open Source development model based on collaboration, community and the shared ownership of knowledge is rapidly expanding to other areas like content (Wikipedia), medicine (Open Source Drug Discovery), scientific publishing (Public Library of Science) and other areas of society.

With 1.5 billion people online, the Internet, which is the largest collaborative platform that mankind has ever seen, has enabled OSS like Linux, Apache, Mozilla Firefox, Open Office and others to flourish. In the next couple of years another 600 million people will join the Internet. Thus the trend towards increasing collaboration is only set to grow and this is reflected in the explosive growth of Open Source projects on websites like sourceforge.net and other collaborative websites.

A few years ago, OSS could be found on the edge of enterprise, running workloads like mail servers and Web servers. However, the growing maturity of the OSS ecosystem means that it is now moving into the very heart of the enterprise, running mission-critical servers, desktop computers and even application areas like CRM, ERP, Document Management, collaborative wikis, Content Management Systems and many others.

For instance, download and check out OpenOffice.org, the full-fledged, Open Source office productivity suite. Many organizations have made OpenOffice.org the default choice on their desktops and have generated significant cost savings when compared to proprietary office suites. A leading bank in India, known for its technological savvy, has almost 70 percent of its staff using Open Office. A few years ago, they looked at the increasing cost and hardware requirements of proprietary software and decided to switch to Open Office.

Initially, users took some time to adjust to the new software, but a four-member helpdesk helped them get comfortable with it. The cost of the help desk was far lower than the licensing fees and the increased hardware costs that would have been incurred on proprietary software, which subsequently was restricted only to a small group of financial analysts within the company.

Similarly, a study done by IIM Ahmedabad found that the Government of Delhi would save almost 80 percent by switching to OpenOffice.org. One important reason for suggesting the switch to Open Office was its support for the Open Document Format, an open standard for office documents, ensuring that needless upgrades of office suites and the underlying hardware would not be forced upon them. The usage of open standards also helped the Government of Delhi avoid vendor lock-in, which invariably reduces negotiation capabilities of the customer and thus contributes to a higher price tag.

In many ways, Open Source is becoming the baseline for software development. Over the last few years, venture capitalists have invested a few billion dollars in Open Source startups and reaped handsome returns. The best minds from across the world are attracted by the open and inclusive development model, and the freedom to modify the source code and improve the software. When compared to the closed development models of proprietary software, which depends almost entirely on internal skills, the Open Source model proves to be superior. Eric Raymond, author of the landmark book on OSS, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” expresses it succinctly: “Many eyes make bugs shallow.” The reliability, robustness and low number of defects per thousand lines of code in Open Source software programs such as Linux and Apache bear this aphorism out.

Of course, CIOs of enterprises need enterprise-class support. The growing adoption of Open Source in enterprises like LIC, Axis Bank, Central Bank of India and Bharti (Airtel), and portals like Naukri.com and Yatra.com, point to the growing support infrastructure for Open Source software.

Finally, while Open Source is not a panacea for every recessionary ill, in these tough times it makes sense to evaluate OSS and compare it with invariably more expensive proprietary software. Those CIOs who judiciously adopt this new paradigm of software development and deployment will undoubtedly benefit from OSS.