Brian Prentice

Earlier this week it was announced that the City of Los Angeles will be equipping 34,000 of their employees with Google Apps for email and collaboration. They are, according to Google, following the lead of Washington D.C. and Orlando, FL. This got me thinking about parallels with other cities like Munich, Amsterdam and Bristol and their efforts to move to open source desktop alternatives like OpenOffice and Linux.

If you get the opportunity to take a look at the quick video explaining LA’s reasons for making the move, two points immediate spring to mind. The first is that they see Google Applications as a way of saving $5.5m over the five year life of the contract. I don’t know whether any one of the 14 proposals LA considered was an open source alternative. But that detail will probably be lost on many who increasingly realize that open source is not always entirely free.

Extrapolating this out, there seems to be the very real potential for cloud applications to overtake open source as a means for the more daring organizations of the world (what Gartner calls Type A organizations) to achieve “order of magnitude” savings. I think this will be a serious challenge for open source adoption if its no longer seen as the price leader.

But there’s another point that’s very clear in the video. LA didn’t make their decision on costs alone. There were  unique things that Google Applications was going to do for them – things in the area of “collaboration, disaster recovery and archiving that they don’t currently have today.”

Clearly, Google has gone in an entirely different route with their approach to applications. They are shunning feature proliferation and instead focusing on simple applications that exploit the collaboration potential of the web. But what about open source alternatives like OpenOffice and Zimbra? Can applications like these be considered new approaches to personal productivity software or simply an open source re-tread of well-worn themes? If it’s the latter – and I’m inclined to say it is – then for many enterprises the only discernible value proposition is price. And I return to the point I’ve just made.

Why don’t we broaden this out. How much does open source development, overall, depend on proprietary alternatives for design cues? Is open source more mimicry than artistry?

As I think about this I would have to admit that in my conversations with our clients I’m hearing a lot more questions about the possibility of migrating to Google Applications than I’m hearing about migrating to open source personal productivity alternatives. And I’m beginning to wonder whether cloud applications, in general, are capturing people’s imagination in ways open source hasn’t because of a lack of imagination in open source  development.

Yes, open source has many powerful value propositions that extend beyond the specific piece of software. But the cruel reality in the enterprise IT world is that those benefits rank well down the list compared to the benefits attached to the product itself. Is that just? Probably not. Will that change anytime soon? Probably not. Maybe we’re at an inflection point where the next big upswing in open source software will be dependent on real out-of-box thinking in the types of software being created.

But just being open source may not be good enough any more.

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