Open Source Will Change Enterprises, Says BT Guru

Governance isn’t hard

Ruston had to apply governance, by “making sure we get the best out of open source” and ensuring licence agreements are kept, and legal risks reduced. However, he thinks fears about the legal consequences of open-source are over-blown. 

More importantly, he is evangelising open source – and this goes outside BT as well as inside:  “The walls of BT are so porous that all my work is directed equally with the outside world,” he said. “With 105,000 people, the easiest way to communicate with them is over the public Internet. Even governance ends up as something outward facing instead of inward facing.”

BT’s engineering heritage means that only people who can “show rather than tell” have any authority, he said, which makes BT surprisingly open to new ways of working such as open source and Wikis – and open source ways of working could drive a new generation of collaboration outside BT, he said: “Open source gives you a way to work with people at other organisations without a whole joint-venture paraphernalia, working on a thing of mutual interest.”

Consumers – even grannies – are buying open source, in devices like the BT HomeHub, said Ruston: “That process will continue – and it will become clearer to consuemrs that many of the proprietary alternatives are indistinguishable from the open source ones.”

Asked about Windows 7, Ruston said Microsoft won’t lose the desktop any time soon, pointing out that the desktop business is still Microsoft’s largest revenue stream, and it can cut prices to keep the business. Councils and other organisations which moved to Linux desktops have quietly moved back to Windows, he said – “and the implication is that Microsoft just cut its prices.”

Open source was never about a price war, he said: “There are other compelling advantages, including theability to fill tiny tiny niches, and make artefacts which are easy to modify and share.”

Don’t believe in licences

“Software licences do not exist,” he said. “They are imaginary objects with no concrete basis. You pay vendors like Microsoft for the effort they put into selling the product, not making it.”

Attitudes are changing in open source, he said. BT people might originally have felt that learning to use the open source Asterisk PBX was like “crawling through a spiky hedge backwards,” because building a service around it was expensives, but that has changed over the last year or so.

“Now there is a wider choice of PBX, and a realisation that maybe you don’t need a PBX at all.” That’s an opportunity that BT will respond to, he said

“BT is exactly the kind of organisation that would make me feel confident to use an open source product,” he said. Staff are engaged, and the company’s scale would insulated users from any uncertainties.