Black Duck Blog

Bill McQuaide
Executive Vice President of Products and Services
bmcquaide@blackducksoftware.com
Open Source as a Silver Bullet: Defying Traditional Dev Tradeoffs between cost, schedule and features.

Application Development managers spend their careers wrestling with what many believe are the inevitable tradeoffs between cost, schedule and features. Listen closely to the regular development staff meetings and you’ll hear things like: “I can deliver on schedule but need to drop some functionality to make it” or “we’ll deliver the desired functionality but we can’t make the schedule, or we will make the schedule but we’ll be over budget because we’re using more people than planned.” To some, managing these three essential tradeoffs is an art, to many it’s a science, regardless successful companies invest a lot in making it work. Over the past few years, it looks like a silver bullet is emerging that doesn’t force the traditional tradeoffs….

One of the highlights of the LinuxCon2010 conference was Jeff Hammond’s presentation on open source adoption in the enterprise. Jeff, a former IBM Rational product manager and long time devotee of developers, was talking about the his latest survey data showing that open source in the enterprise had arrived, “crossed the chasm” and was being widely adopted. As part of the reason why, Jeff explained that open source delivered value to dev teams that hit on all three elements of cost, schedule, and features, what he called the “software ‘iron triangle’”, and did so simultaneously, making open source a “silver bullet.”

Jeff Hammond, Forrrester Research LinuxCon 2010

It seems to defy the laws of physics at some level, but let’s look at an example. Using open source components in a web application, dev teams can employ an authentication framework or a database ORM to replace internal code, which saves coding resources. It also shortens the project schedule and can increase the feature set delivered since the dev team can shift time and effort from developing commodity code to adding differentiating features most highly valued by customers.

There’s a lot of research lately showing that open source is changing how Enterprises develop software. Reinforcing much of what Jeff Hammond presented at LinuxCon 2010 is a recent Accenture survey that said open source is changing the business operates its IT function. If open source can relieve some of the traditional tradeoff around the “software iron triangle,” it sure seems like IT would be embracing it.

We see that happening at many of our customer’s shops, what’s it like in your shop?

Bill McQuaide
Executive Vice President of Products and Services
bmcquaide@blackducksoftware.com
A recent post on open data from Stephen O’Grady of RedMonk and a great presentation by Zack Urlocker on software disruption have us thinking about open source, the cloud, and disruptive business models – some of our favorite topics.

A powerful force for change, disruption creates new markets, expands opportunities for incumbents, and can benefit users. Disruption also destroys. There are numerous examples of incumbent companies buying disruptive startups – not to assimilate their technology, but to kill it.

So managing disruption, and recognizing that it is coming to a town near you, is critical to running a sustainable business. Clayton Christensen (referenced in Zack’s slides) in his seminal book “The Innovators’ Dilemma” covers disruption and what incumbents can do about it in great detail. It is a must read for people interested in this topic.

There are many who think that open source is disruptive to such a degree that it’s not possible for incumbents to maintain share and innovate in markets where open source has a foothold – mobile, web, media, SaaS, cloud and software development, for example. A corollary question is who makes money from open source. Is it the disruptors like MySQL, the incumbents like Red Hat, the companies that sell OSS-related products and services like Black Duck, or the OSS projects that achieve share and velocity and become contenders, like Lucene? Who are the victims, who are the victors, and who are the beneficiaries of disruption as it plays out in open source?

Arguably Novell is a victim of disruption. Its well-documented struggle to make open source innovation (SuSE) the engine of its business while being held back by a dependence on legacy revenue streams for quarter-to-quarter results is a textbook study on the perils of being an incumbent. Matt Asay recently wrote a piece on how Novell can reinvent itself. The takeaway? Go private with the help of private equity firms, sell off the legacy bits that act as sea anchors, and use what’s left to rebuild a company focused on innovation.

In the Novell example, the disruptive power of open source was not enough to overcome the challenges of incumbency and save the company.

MySQL might be viewed as a victor. The proof is in the purchase: Oracle bought Sun/MySQL because that’s how (as Matt Asay points out) many big companies with entrenched technologies innovate: they buy innovators.

The beneficiaries? That would be the users. In mobile, for example, open source has totally disrupted the market. OSS platforms have displaced vendor operating systems, and users are the beneficiaries.

But disruption doesn’t always make things better, and it doesn’t always move things in the right direction (up and to the right, of course). Neither does open source.

Nevertheless open source can’t be ignored, because it’s gone mainstream, at least in software development. That’s the power of disruption. We’ve seen figures that indicate 85 percent of enterprises use OSS, and 45 percent of that use is in mission-critical applications – not where one would expect disruption to be an advantage.

Take a look at Zack’s slides and think of the ways in which the disruptive forces of open source can help your company make the transition from incumbent to innovator, or from upstart innovator to serious player in an established market. It’s a journey every business has to make to build a sustainable business model.

Bill McQuaide
Executive Vice President of Products and Services
bmcquaide@blackducksoftware.com

Recently I met with the enterprise architecture team at a global financial services firm headquartered in NYC. The company is organized along a number of large, independent business units. Given the relative autonomy of the business units, it’s not a surprise that the organization has suffered from a proliferation of applications (there are thousands), as well as the software components used to build the applications. Much of the code was built in silos with minimum re-use within and across development organizations. And like developers around the world, they’ve leveraged a large amount of open source but don’t have an inventory of what’s used, where, nor good controls for monitoring and updating it.

In the meeting they described how the financial crisis and the economic downturn forced a reduction in the applications development staff. During better times, code proliferation and redundant development were inefficiencies that could be tolerated. But with the recession, they’ve been forced to reduce staff and budget, causing them to re-evaluate their software development and management practices. As the saying goes “necessity is the mother of invention.”

To keep up the pace of innovation with fewer staff, they set out new development goals: drive standardization and re-use of internally developed software, broaden the use of open source for time to market and cost reasons and put a better software management infrastructure in place. They quickly determined that to accomplish these goals would require automation technology. They are in the process of evaluating the Black Duck Suite to: 1) Drive standardization through creation of an OSS catalog, 2) create an efficient way to facilitate re-use of internally developed software and open source, 3) discover what open source is used through out the firm, , and 4) implement and automate an approval process for using new open source components.

This company’s challenges – fewer resources, but continuing pressure to innovate — and their goals are common themes we hear from our customers. We think we can help them with our solution and know-how for multi-source development using open source components. What’s going on in your shop? How do you manage these challenges?