| Open source software is now under serious consideration in many organizations.
The success of several open source products, particularly Apache and
Linux, in the enterprise has come surprisingly quickly, given that they were
not commercially available ten years ago. It is important for managers
responsible for adopting technology to be fully aware of the issues that open
source represents to their organizations.
A set of new technologies is nothing new to the information technology
professional, of course. There are always new technologies and business
structures, and the steps that we take to evaluate and adopt them are not so
different. But each new set of innovations can also bring new kinds of challenges.
Open source offers, in addition to a very rich set of technologies
with long histories, a set of new ways to look at certain problems. Issues
that are new now include:
A variety of new licensing options, and claims from some quarters
that some of these introduce new business risks
Opportunities to deal with the loosely structured community that
creates open source, from selecting distributions and buying products
to hiring and retaining staff
The possibility that open source software is built and maintained in a
different way, and the implications this has for our organizations |
