Daniel ShollerIn the course of an interesting conversation on a different topic, I heard a rumor that could have a significant effect on the perception of open source. The person I was speaking with mentioned that certain agencies in the US Department of Defense and Intelligence communities were thinking of biasing their procurement policies toward open source, because they felt that it was more secure than traditional closed source products.
Now, the idea that the Federal government favors open source is not strange, mainly because it gives them flexibility that is constrained by their procurement rules (an example) . And furthermore the idea that they might be modifying the rules to favor open source is not strange (although the source of this rumor was someone who makes money from open source software, so they have a vested interest in the outcome). However, the idea that the organizations whom we delegate the responsibility for our national security have a reason to believe that open source is more secure would be huge.
The team here at Gartner is already seeing a tremendous uptick in interest in the past few months. The majority of our middleware product related inquiries include a discussion of open source alternatives. However, it is still usually the case that the strategic, mission critical projects use proprietary software, and the open source is used in a similar function for the rest of the portfolio. One of the main reasons for this is a lingering unease about the quality of open source products and the community development processes that create these products. If this rumor were true, that would go a long way toward dispelling that unease.
Whether or not this rumor is true, I expect to see a number of this type of event over the coming year that will substantially improve the way open source middleware (and open source products in general) are perceived.
(Gartner subscribers: check out the discussions of open source in government and open source in MOM
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1 response so far ↓
1 Whit September 26, 2008 at 9:23 pm
I’ll note that the Library of Congress is certainly one of the most significant users of Lucene, Dan — that’s not giving anything away, whether or not they’re our client, because you can find evidence of their interest all over the Web. Like the folks in the intelligence community, the Library has a vested interest in extreme stability of applications for the extreme long term, and maybe a need for even longer term stability than other government agencies. The LOC does not drive procurement momentum in the enterprise search market, but it does bring gravitas, and I believe its early interest in Lucene has been a harbinger of interest than I now see from major vendors such as IBM.