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FOSE means:
“Free/Open Source Expo” -
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, Chairman of Sun Microsystems
“Federal Open Source Expo” -
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, Principal of OpenSource Connections
When the chairman of a company
that spends $2 Billion dollars yearly on R&D makes more or less the
same joke that you do, it makes you see the kernal of truth in that
statement.
I attended Scott McNealy’s keynote on the first day of FOSE
expecting something about cloud computing, or network security. Some
sort of very “Federal IT” type of topic. Instead he spent an hour
making the case for why the Federal Goverment needs to embrace Open
Source Software. And he made that case by walking through a number of
reasons:
No Barrier to Entry: Getting started with open
source software doesn’t require an RFP process to be undertaken. You
can just download the software, and he’d like you to download that
stack that Sun has open sourced: OpenSolaris, Java, OpenOffice, MySQL
etc. He made the case that with open source, you can prototype your
application without spending capital up front on licenses before you
know what you’ll need for a production system.
More Interoperablity: The Federal Government builds
systems that last a VERY long time. So there are lots and lots of
different vendors, different platforms, different interfaces.. Scott
cracked the joke that “… you have two of everything, no, actually you
have 200 of everything…” which means that most of the Federal IT
budgets are spent on maintence and support of existing legacy systems
that are old, inefficient, and cumbersome, and only a very small slice
is spent on new systems. Open Source systems drive interoperablity
because the source is available. Anyone can look at the interfaces of a
system built using open source and figure out how to provide
interoperatiblity. Interoperabilty means the cost of integrating legacy
and new systems drops drastically.
Sharing: Sharing means more R&D per dollar. Sun
is the 42 largest spender on R&D in the world. They spend over $2
billion dollars a year, but because they have open sourced most of
their portfolio, they can leverage the efforts of others. For the $2
billion they spend they estimate they get over $5 billion a year in
addtional value on their open source portfolio of software from around
the world. Sharing begets sharing.
Communites drive adoption: By opensourcing the
Sparc microchip as “OpenSparc, the Chinese technical universities have
standarized on that platform as what their students will be learning
on. Guess who is going to be advocating Sun’s Sparc chips when they
graduate school? Guess where Sun will be finding innovative ideas for
the Sparc chip design?
Safe, Secure: Open Source is more secure then
closed source. Software gets hacked when it contains sccrets that
people find. A big secret leads to a big security hole. Open Source, by
it’s nature, doesn’t have secrets, therefore you can trust it to be
secure. Open Source code is heavily vetted by peer communities.
And biggest of all: No Barrier to Exit. Scott spent
the most time on this point, suggesting that the barrier to exit is the
biggest cost to any IT system. He said there are three costs: A) the
initial acquisition cost… B) the lifetime opperating cost. And both of
those are typically addressed in an RFP issued by the Federal
Government. But cost C), moving to a new system is never factored into
an RFP. So once a vendor has sold the government a system, they keep
the renewel cost “… just 5$ less then cost of moving to another
system…”.
So there you have it, from the chairman of Sun why open source is
the way forward for Federal IT projects, direct from FOSE: the Federal
Open Source Expo!
Read the original article: http://www.opensourceconnections.com/2008/04/03/fose-is-the-federal-open-source-expo/
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