MYTH 4
IT'S A LEGAL MINEFIELDA variety of open-source licences exist, and helping CIOs understand their implications is good business for lawyers - very good business. "[CIOs'] concerns chiefly revolve around the implications of using code to which they can't verify their right to use," says Jeff Norman, a partner in the intellectual property practice of law firm Kirkland & Ellis. "Just because you've got a piece of paper saying that you own the Brooklyn Bridge, it doesn't mean that you actually own it."
For some users, third-party indemnification is an option. On November 17, 2003, for example, JBoss Group announced it will indemnify and defend JBoss customers from legal action alleging JBoss copyright or patent infringement. Other vendors of open-source software - including HP, Red Hat and Novell - also offer indemnifications of varying types.
And while conceding that the situation isn't perfect, Sabre's Murphy says that he's heard all the legal arguments he needs. "It's a concern, sure, but we've basically got to do this. There may be friction and challenges - but I don't see any showstoppers" (see "Open Source Under Attack", left).
MYTH 5
OPEN SOURCE ISN'T FOR MISSION-CRITICAL APPLICATIONSMission-critical apps don't come any more crucial than those in banking, where transaction systems simply have to work, period. Experimenting with open source, with its attendant risks in terms of potential infringement, security and maintenance, might be regarded as anathema. "Banks tend to be conservative institutions - first followers, if you like, rather than leaders," says Clive Whincup, CIO of Italian bank Banca Popolare di Milano, who freely admits that the bank's venture into open source was the result of "some fairly lateral thinking".
But walk into Banca Popolare's smart new branch on the Via Savona in Milan's Zona Solari district, and the service these days is much faster than customers have previously experienced. The reason? Unwilling to throw out the bank's legacy banking applications, totalling some 90 million lines of Cobol, but unable to keep them running under IBM's vintage OS/2 Presentation Manager operating system, Whincup has used a proprietary legacy integration tool from Jacada to connect the Cobol to IBM's WebSphere - running in a Linux partition on the bank's mainframe.
The result: Formerly disjointed applications now run slickly in a Web browser, yielding faster transaction times, less time spent training tellers - and many more opportunities for cross-selling the bank's services.
Billed by insiders as one of Europe's largest Linux projects, the Zona Solari branch is piloting the new system, says Whincup. Once testing is complete, full rollout will begin in May. One decision to be made before then: whether to leave the branch desktops running Windows XP, as in the Zona Solari pilot, or move them to Linux as well. "Both of the next two branches to pilot the system will be using Linux [on the desktop]," Whincup says.
MYTH 6
OPEN SOURCE ISN'T READY FOR THE DESKTOPAt Baylis Distribution, a transport and distribution company, IT director Chris Helps came across the MySQL database four years ago when the company was looking to create a data warehouse. Around the same time, the company began experimenting with Linux, he says, for small-scale, non critical applications. The move to mission criticality came last year after the vendor of the company's propriety logistics management system, Chess Logistics, brought out a new version that ran on Linux - a version that promised to improve performance by a factor of between 10 and 15 times. Helps happily signed up, and he hasn't regretted the decision.
But his experience of running Red Hat Linux in a true production environment, with users logging on to the main Linux server from what he describes as "thin clients with a cut down Linux operating system", prompted him to re-evaluate the company's desktop policy. In the end, the company opted to replace Microsoft on desktops with Linux and open-source personal productivity tools for activities such as word-processing and spreadsheets.
"We've not done a formal evaluation of the savings, but a broad-brush calculation is that it costs $US1820 per seat to install a PC with all the Microsoft tools a user needs. With Linux, and open-source tools, it's only around half that," Helps says. What's more, usability improved. "People can log in from any PC in the group and have all the same services and facilities available to them as if they were sitting at their own desks." Better still, IT support is simplified. "We haven't got the complications of users establishing a unique personalized environment on their desktops: We've got better control, better upgradeability and better traceability."
Nor is Helps alone. Other IT shops - as big and diverse as Siemens Business Services and the Chinese government - are also convinced that Linux is ready for the desktop. Siemens, for example, says it has performed extensive testing with "real-world, non technical workers", finally declaring that Linux has now matured as a desktop system. The tests confounded the company's expectations. "We [at first] didn't see Linux on the desktop as a major market, but we were wrong," says a spokesman for the 35,000-employee organization that serves more than 40 countries.
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