Open source development – but without the disadvantages

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Technologies change quickly, strategies don’t. But if you don’t keep up tactically, you will fall behind on your competitors. The future of your company is relying on product development like never before, and IT development must keep pace. That’s the harsh reality of today.

Open source technologies give developers an unprecedented access to easily accessible tooling, to provide speedy development and deployment of applications. That checkbox has been ticked for companies who set their mind to it. Now it is time to think about step two: how to maintain open source based applications for the long term, and to improve development cycles based on what you have learned in the earlier process.

Three considerations

1. Developers want to develop – Once an application has been deployed in production, developers move on to the next project, trying to keep pace with market developments and the expectations of internal stakeholders. There are many things to focus on. Of course agile methods give structure, but this also comes with constant deadlines. What you don’t need, are issues arising from interoperability and configuration. Actually over 95 percent of the questions reaching a helpdesk fall in that category. You don’t need to have development skills to solve them, but meanwhile the organization considers you as the open source expert who takes this up.

2. Moving from community to commercial open source software? – Sentiments towards open technology are either positive or negative. Some companies only allow commercial versions in production, others allow all sorts of community editions. Scenario’s like developing on community editions, and deploying in commercial versions are very common. The frictions arise when applications migrate from development to production. Between development and operations, or within the DevOps teams, trade offs are made to comply with company guidelines. This could result in delay in deployment because of code rewrites, migrations to other software versions, additional testing. How can you deploy in the most efficient way? Have you kept future maintenance of the application in mind?

3. Organising licensing when working with open source software – One more thing easily overlooked by people with a technical mindset is licensing. There are over 200 different licenses in open source technology. These aren’t static, they tend to change over time. Just because something is free doesn’t mean there are no obligations, and breaches bring risk to a company. Suppose your application is used for business critical workload and used on a very large scale. You want to be sure you got your licensing obligations cut and clear. It is a skill in itself to understand all these different compliance requirements and to keep up with the changes. Are you or your colleagues capable of that? Do you want to be involved in discussions on this topic?

Probably you can use a little help with this. What if a third party takes care of the support of all our open source software? That helps you switch between community software and commercial software? And on top get all your licenses organised? If you recognise the value, you may want to give us a some of your time. We see the future of IT as open, and the future of IT service as holistic and integrated.

If you want to further discuss things. Contact me and I’m happy to help!
M: +31 651 19 04 99
E: richard_renckens@nl.ibm.com