I’m very excited to share something from a colleague of mine. Brahma Sen is a technical engineer at InnovaTech and isn’t shy about his passion for open-source technologies.

Recently, Brahma attended an Open-Source Conference hosted by the Association for Enterprise Integration (AFEI). He has agreed to share his experience.

Thanks Brahma.

You would think the Defense community and Open Source wouldn’t mix together, given their wary nature to everybody but themselves. Well, I was pleasantly surprised to find a high level of participation from the Defense community at one of the 2-Day Open Source Conference, organized by the Association for Enterprise Integration (AFEI). Most of attendees were big Defense contractors like Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, CSC, Boeing as well as representatives from the Army, Navy and Air Force.

One of the misconceptions about open source is, “How can something free be of any value?” There is no free lunch, right?

For the comeback reply, the VP of Marketing from Sun Microsystems summed it up well when he compared open source to ever abundant “water”. While freely available on earth, the water packaging industry makes money selling you bottled ones.

The good part of this model is that the product has to be better than average and the vendors cannot just hike the price as they want. The cost has to be proportional to the quality of the product and service. Go and tell this to Microsoft when your windows system reboots itself in the middle of a presentation.

People talk about lack of Security in the same breath as Open Source. As it turns out, an Open Source System is more secure than any commercial product since more eyeballs are looking under its hood and there is nothing under the rug that anybody can hide.

So, you may ask, “why is it not taking off like a rocket?” Open-Source still suffers from many misconceptions and it is hard to break the common beliefs. One concern users have voiced is the potential inability to hold somebody accountable for any misgivings with the product. Not everybody is willing or able to roll up their sleeves and fix it on their own. Then, there are many policy and governance issues to consider such as different licensing models, Intellectual Property (IP) rights, and product release schedule.

All these issues are addressed differently for different products. As per sourceForge.net, there are around 195,000 open source products out of which approximately 10% are really active. The use of Open Source product continues to grow fast. In one of the studies, it was found that about 30-50% of components of modern software products are open source. Many commercial products include open source components as well.

The allure of the open source product is not only its quality but also how it addresses “the long tail” of niches. Many commercial vendors don’t provide solutions to specialized problems due to lack of Return On Investment (ROI). This is where open source products fit squarely. Open source is a disruptive force yet its vital presence in the long tail of markets helps expand our economy. In fact, this is one of the primary reasons why the Defense community embraces Open Source since it has so many niche and unique needs.

Realizing the potential of Open Source, the US Navy has created an Open Source Model Repository where they publish different services and components and people with similar needs can access them.

Many vendors like CSC, TIBCO and others have built solutions using complete Open Source products. Vendors like Ball Space are converting their current products to Open Source to encourage re-use and greater acceptance so they can gain new service contracts.

With so much support for the adoption of Open-Source technologies, especially by perhaps the most conservative agencies within the Federal Government, isn’t it clear that Open Source is not only here to stay, but also will grow as more and more federal agencies and commercial corporations start using it.

So, what is your organization doing about Open Source?

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