Open Source Flies In A Recession, Says Ingres

The signs of change, paradoxically, come from the places that were once most in thrall to the big proprietary vendors, such as giant consultancies – even ones which have long been in Microsoft’s grip: “Accenture has just started to go public with open source projects,” says Burkhardt. It’s more than lip service, and includes deals which took a lot of resource and work, he says – but they’re moving that way because users want it and they can get better innovation within open source.

“Two years ago there was plenty of work for them around high price proprietary software,” he said. “Now customers want to do more with less – they’re tending to cancel, and postpone deals, or take the work elsewhere

Getting out of the ELA will cost you

But in the details of deals, things are more complicated, he admits. Large users effectively have flat-rate deals under Oracle’s enterprise licence agreement (ELA), so the actual incremental cost of every system they build on Oracle is zero – but the pain comes in a few years’ time when Oracle asks for the next payment, and the user is tangled even tighter in Oracle’s web.

In the short term, in other words, open source can actually cost more. “Users need to know how to transition their portfolio,” says Burkhardt. “Making a new system in Oracle might be ‘free’ under the ELA, but there’s actually a multi-million dollar cost.” Users need to recognise that the current cost of developing with their existing database may be low, but it will eventually hit them when the ELA is renewed.

Put like that, it seems that open source actually has a hard job in a recession, I suggest. There’s an extra cost, instead of a deferred one with proprietary systems. “You have to remember the time frame,” says Burkhardt. “This is not a short term budget cut. This is not a blip. You need to act.”

Despite this, moving to open source does require thinking during the procurement process, he says. If there are costs in moving from proprietary software to open source, the business case has to project a money saving in the future.

Part of the value then is the leverage the user gains with the vendor: “if they can move fifteen percent of their application portfolio to an open source stack that they will gain sufficient negotiating leverage with their proprietary vendors to greatly reduce costs on the other 85,” says Burkhardt.

Alongside this, benefits such as simplicity can be brought into play, says Burkhardt: “Open source is seen as a risky options, but arguably it’s less risky. Proprietary vendors have an incentive to drive up complexity, loading on bloated software features that users don’t really require. And complexity is the enemy of reliability.”

Those incentives don’t operate in the open source world, he says: “The functions are driven by the customer. That leads to simplicity, speed and lower risk.”

Tomorrow: The UK government’s open source record, and the fate of MySQL