NZ slow to buy into free code

Oracle manager Robert Gosling says Linux dominates new installations.

New Zealand businesses are shunning open source software and missing out on the potential benefits it offers, according to IT consultancy Forrester.

Adoption rates for open source - non-licensed software with freely available source code - are much lower in New Zealand and Australia than in North America, according to a Forrester Research report.

Only 16 per cent of Australasian companies told Forrester they used the Linux operating system or other open source software, compared with 56 per cent in North America.

A further 8 per cent of Australasian businesses said they planned to use open source over the next year (compared with 19 per cent in North America), but 77 per cent had no plans to do so (26 per cent in North America).

However Greg Woolley, managing director of IT consultancy Certus, said he suspected the report painted a bleaker picture for open source uptake than was the reality.

"There's a degree of ignorance about what's open source and what's not. A lot of commercial products have open source products embedded inside them," he said.

"Any IBM customer doing software development is using the Eclipse framework, which is open source. So all of their developers have basically got open source software installed on their PCs. That would pretty much encompass every financial institution in New Zealand and Australia. So some of those adoption numbers [in the report] I think are a little flawed."

Woolley said Linux's popularity was continuing to grow because IT service companies could now offer a significant amount of technical support and expertise around it.

"Linux is our preferred operating system and what we recommend to our customers because it's so much more stable than Windows," he said.

"Getting Linux to go is more complex than getting a Windows server configured. The benefit is that once a Linux box is running it just sits in the corner and goes and goes whereas a Windows box falls over and has security patches constantly being applied and has all the inherent dramas associated with Windows."

Oracle's New Zealand country manager Robert Gosling said 90 per cent of new application installations done for his company's mainly big business client base now involved a Linux platform.

"This says it's definitely there being used commercially and successfully," he said.

Although Linux has won significant fans as an operating system, when it comes to application software - programs that do everything from word processing to database management - businesses are more cautious about using open source versions.

Woolley said open source could suit some business situations but behind the carrot of free software there were often hidden costs a business needed to take into consideration.

Open source developers typically make their money by selling support and maintenance services to those using their software.

"Someone has to support it," said Woolley. "Whether you pay someone to support it or you have someone in-house who spends a lot of time getting competent in a particular piece of open source software, that still costs money."

Sam Higgins, the author of the Forrester report, said the low uptake of open source was because of businesses' confusion about open source and the software market in general.

"For almost 50 years, customers have been conditioned to buy software from vendors and their approved partners. Under this traditional one-stop model, vendors provide all aspects of the software ecosystem: product development, distribution, services, and marketing," he wrote.

"Now, end user organisations are caught in a no-man's-land somewhere between the old world model they know and a new, networked world of open source."

Internationally, a high-profile open source success story is database program MySQL, a rival to Oracle's core database business.

Oracle's Gosling said that although it was popular with website operators, MySQL was not widely used by large New Zealand organisations.

"If you're a technology manager responsible for running mission critical business applications, you need to be pretty confident of the support, the availability of resources and the scalability and reliability of the underlying infrastructure."

In October, IT company Novell struck a deal with about 50 Government organisations to provide open source software together with cheap support services.

At the time, State Services Commission deputy commissioner Laurence Millar hailed the deal as bringing a new level of competition into the Government software market.

Woolley said that type of broad agreement would help boost the uptake of open source technology.

In an example of using extreme measures to push the open standard cause along, the state Government of Massachusetts has declared all its departments must abandon Microsoft document file formats by next year.

This means the state's Government employees will not be allowed to store files in Microsoft's ubiquitous ".doc" and ".xls" word processing and spreadsheet formats.

Instead they will have to use the open standard PDF and OpenDocument standards.

Massachusetts has argued that the regular tinkering Microsoft does to its file formats made archiving state documents created by its software impractical.

Woolley, however, was unconvinced.

"I don't know what the benefit of that would be. Like it or lump it, Microsoft have got a pretty dominant position in the whole office automation, spreadsheet and word processing market and the reality is that things like OpenOffice can accept Microsoft files anyway," he said.

"It sounds very much like a puritanical approach to the situation. I can't see any benefits from doing that."

Closed minds: 
* New Zealand and Australia are significantly behind the rest of the world in adopting open source software, a report says.
* Many businesses don't understand its benefits and are afraid to make the switch.
* But some analysts say the report paints a bleaker picture than is the reality, with many companies using open source without even knowing it.