Opening the Door

to Open Source Benefits

Andrew Brabban

It is now widely accepted in our industry that open source software (OSS) has a central role to play in reducing the cost and boosting the flexibility of mainstream IT. Echoing the broad and growing support from business, all the major political parties now believe that OSS needs to be on the agenda for public sector IT deployments as well. But unless organisations rethink how they evaluate the software against proprietary options, they are in serious danger of missing out on the significant benefits OSS can deliver.

The problem stems from the fact that the community-driven open source environment operates under a very different model to the proprietary software that has been the backbone of businesses and government agencies for decades. Over this time, organisations have evolved robust processes to assess the benefits and total cost of ownership of software based on a clear understanding of licensing arrangements, ongoing support costs, legal implications and suppliers’ responsibilities. But attempting to compare OSS on the same footing is fraught with difficulties.

Andrew Brabban is CTO for Application Services at Fujitsu UK & Ireland. He has 20 years’ experience delivering application services.

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