Open Source Poses “Huge Risk” To Organisations

A chief information officer for engineering giant General Electric (GE) has said that open source software is only suited for internal “playground” applications and that businesses that use it for mission critical infrastructure are taking a huge risk.

Responding to a question from eWEEK Europe UK on the first day of the Central and Eastern European IT Leaders Summit & Expo, in Budapest, Peter Gyorgy, chief information officer of GE’s Consumer and Industrial division in Europe, said non-proprietary code presents a significant risk to companies.

“I think open source is great for own internal playground type of things but if it’s running vital mission critical applications – networks running on open source for example – then that is a huge, huge risk to the organisation,” he said.

Gyorgy was taking part in a panel discussion on how companies in Central and Eastern Europe are adjusting their IT operations to respond to the credit crunch. Asked by eWEEK Europe UK whether open source offered one way for businesses and the government to cut costs associated with proprietary software, Gyorgy dismissed the approach as one that could put businesses at risk. 

“We are not here to be an IT shop, we are here to be the partner of a business and we shouldn’t put businesses operations into risk by running very low cost solutions,” he said.

The GE CIO also made a passing reference to Oracle’s planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems and its MySQL open source database business which is currently being investigated by the European Commission over possible competition issues.

“I cannot personally ever imagine that, at a large company, that MySQL databases are ever going to take over from Oracle databases for example or that we will ever have an open source ERP system that is taking over from Oracle or SAP,” he added.

Gyorgy’s comments may surprise some other parts of the company, as GE has been reported to be a user of JBoss open source middleware and other open source applications. GE Healthcare has also been a user of the open source Linux operating system since as far back as 2007 for seemingly critical applications.

Despite the concerns of companies such as GE about the maturity of open source, governments across Europe have come under pressure to change the way they procure software to allow for more open source alternatives to be considered.

Late last week, the European Commission released the Malmo declaration on approaches to e-government in the region, which includes a commitment to put open-source solutions on an equal footing when it comes to awarding government contracts.

In February, the UK government said it intended to use open source to save £600 million a year and published guidelines the that effect but, despite this, the UK lags badly at open source, using it less than countries like Mali, open source activists said at a meeting in September. 

Elsewhere in Europe, other countries including Switzerland and Hungary have seen action taken by open source backers to force governments to break-down barriers to the use of non-proprietary software in the public sector. In an open letter to the Hungarian government’s procurement agency earlier this month – Directorate General for Central Services (KSZF) – the Open Document Format Alliance (ODFA) stated that last year the government spent around 9.5bn Hungarian forints (£32 million) on Microsoft software and has already spent 6.3 million euros (£5.6 million) on educational licenses and millions more on consultation and services from the software giant.

“Please make your calculations known to the public which will prove that open source will not be a viable low cost alternative,” the letter states.

The UK government is also involved in the drafting of the new Malmo regulations and has pledged support for extending its existing commitment to open source across Europe, despite the concerns over whether it has even been able to apply the policy in its own country.