Lost the war?

Pic caption: Riedwaan Bassadien, Microsoft SA.

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"Linux is a cancer," declared Microsoft's then-CEO Steve Ballmer in a 2001 interview. It was roughly a decade after the maverick operating system was launched by Linus Torvalds, both periods which seem generations removed from today's IT world. It looks like 1991 and 2001 had a lot in common: proprietary was king, the internet was nascent, and software solutions came in large packages and rigid ecosystems.

Both sides had a go. For every utterance such as Ballmer's, open source advocates hit back with puns like 'Microsoft'. Internet Explorer bumped heads with Firefox. Many laughed at Java's ambitions to run interoperable software through emulators.

Today paints a very different picture. Services (XaaS) is making ring-fenced systems a niche practice. Interoperability is an expected feature. New technology companies such as Google and Facebook ignored the antagonism between proprietary and open source by simply using both. The result is a market where much of proprietary software's stigmas over open source have been laid to rest, while the open source culture had to adjust from its own nose-thumbing attitudes towards business and monetisation.

"Microsoft wants to win, so at first it had a combative view towards open source," says Riedwaan Bassadien, open source strategy lead at Microsoft SA. "But it has grown to view open source as an opportunity, not the least because conversations with our customers have highlighted this. Many companies run heterogeneous systems made from many different solutions. Software philosophy comes secondary to solving their problems. So many ideas associated with open source, like interoperability, open standards and community support, have become important."

It may seem odd to interview Microsoft about open source, particularly given the opening comment. But in the past several years, the company has shifted its position, seeing the bigger solutions-driven picture emerging.

This has also created a shift among open source communities, says Leon Marincowitz, an open source advocate with the Open Source Software 4 South Africa (OSSSA) group: "The whole business model has changed. Thanks to the internet, barriers of entry are much lower, which means more companies can adopt from a wider range of solutions. This has forced open source to grow up and meet business halfway. Not only have more vendors started to incorporate open source, but there are more vendors rising out of open source."

One such vendor is CoreOS, a US company that offers significant back-end services and server management for Linux. It offers its individual components as open source, but has a commercial solutions point known as Tectonic.

"Our model would only work if the core components are generally adopted," says Alex Polvi, CoreOS CEO. "By making those open source, we make it more attractive for the market to consume. It lowers the barriers for adoption."

Not only have more vendors started to incorporate open source, but there are more vendors rising out of open source.

'Barriers for adoption' is a piece of jargon that surfaced in every conversation for this article and it lies at the heart of what has changed about the software world. Today, it is much easier for a company of any size to adopt software and architecture solutions previously only affordable to big enterprises.

This has opened the market significantly, prompting proprietary software vendors to take on attitudes more associated with open source. Bassadien notes that Azure, Microsoft's cloud ecosystem, is designed to support implementations that aren't from the company's stable.

"Around 20 percent of software deployments on Azure are Linux-based, and we're aiming to grow that number," he says. "We want Azure to be a platform for open source applications."

This idea follows in the wake of companies like Amazon, which have built large platforms that are not picky about the software they support. This new way is pushing innovation, says Polvi: "We hope to enable companies to build products that didn't exist before, because they now have access to serious architectures."

The practice of ring-fencing systems appears to be making way for a platform play: vendors are not as precious about their own software anymore and would prefer to provide the foundations on which other software exists.

That concept might just sound like a reinvention of traditional operating systems, but it goes beyond this. Today's world is driven by data, which is increasingly becoming a valuable commodity to companies. This complements the need for interoperability: it's not what a solution is deployed on that matters, but that data and services are accessible regardless of a company's needs. Open standards are not a new concept to circles, but this demand from clients has placed a much bigger emphasis on playing nice with others.

"There's more demand for data sets to be open and usable," says Marincowitz. "A manager at a remote municipality doesn't want to fight with software just to access data. So if it's an Excel sheet, the convenience of quickly downloading something like LibreOffice makes a big difference."

But again this is not the only side to the coin, as proprietary standards can drive innovation by protecting cutting-edge ideas. Thus it's becoming more common for solutions to incorporate both proprietary and open source components. The architectures powering companies like Facebook and Google are perfect examples of how potent this approach is.

So, to answer the question of who won the war, the answer is 'the customer'. Both sides of the fence have matured in their perspectives and found mutual ground. Polvi points out that vendor support has been critical for business adoption of open source.

At the same time, vendors are seeing the benefit of cultivating communities around their solutions, cultivation that works best when open source concepts are in play. According to Bassadien, this is another reason for Microsoft's growing enthusiasm towards open source. The concept of openness creates more value and agility.

The latter is particularly important in today's security-conscious world, since problems can be spotted and addressed far more quickly. Marincowitz raises the example of Heartbleed, a critical flaw discovered in OpenSSL last year. The problem was exposed and patched quickly; in the case of Canonical, creator of Ubuntu Linux, that turnaround happened in under an hour.

But communities have to be nurtured; something traditional vendors have found they are particularly good at. In return, they create a healthy rapport with third-party developers, contributing code and collaborating. Public institutions such as NASA have seen great benefits from engaging developers on Github, the largest public open source collaboration hub.

We hope to enable companies to build products that didn't exist before, because they now have access to serious architectures.

Alex Polvi, CoreOS

"The value of open source is that communities can create great software," says Karl Fischer, technical consultant at Obsidian Systems. "Open source is inherently buzzword-compliant, with a strong, focused roadmap on features desired by the community and demanded by enterprise."

The software world remains in a state of flux. Commentators admit that as far as the business model of this new software order goes, nobody has any real answers yet. But the market likes what it sees and the vendors are responding to that enthusiasm. Using software to drive business has broken the one-size-fits-all mentality. The internet has laid waste to many adoption barriers.

In such an environment, working together makes more sense than staying apart. But in truth, open source and proprietary have already been walking alongside each other for a number of years. Many major tech services companies like Google and Amazon wouldn't exist otherwise. 'Open Source vs Proprietary' makes for sexy headlines, but today's solution providers, regardless which side they come from, benefit from standing in both camps.

This article was first published in Brainstorm magazine. Click here to read the complete article at the Brainstorm website.