By Dan Skeen
Open source software, once considered the realm of idealists and risk-takers, is increasingly finding its way into the corporate IT toolkit.
For Grant Swinbourne, general manager of Online Channels at Jetstar Airways, the decision to use an open source content management system, Joomla!, saved his company software licensing costs close to $100,000 and "hundreds of hours" in contract negotiations and budget approvals.
The company needed a content management system for jetstar.com, a web property that handles 2.4 million unique visitors a month. The software had to include remote content contributors in multiple countries and foreign language capabilities.
Mr Swinbourne says that Jetstar eliminated software licensing costs by choosing Joomla! over commercial products such as Interwoven. The company also sidestepped hours of contractual negotiations and budget approvals.
Open source adoption has grown to 60 per cent among US companies surveyed by Forrester in a 2004 report, with Linux and Apache at the top of the list. However, a similar Forrester report on Australia and New Zealand in 2005 showed that only 18 per cent of companies surveyed were using Linux.
Reported savings run into the millions of dollars on average. Open source proponents also claim that regular updates and "collective brain" development methods create more secure products. They believe that a network of enthusiastic programmers can find bugs or malicious codes more effectively than a small, salaried team.
Mr Swinbourne agrees. "The community is pretty self-cleaning. Nobody who is there for legitimate purposes wants illegitimate code in their environment."
Sound software development and quality assurance practices are essential, particularly with non-core code that has not been vigorously tested. Mr Swinbourne is careful not to place too much confidence in beta code: his team tests rigorously and modifies the code to fix problems.
Next Lessons
Problem: Jetstar wanted a content management system for its web portal but without months of negotiations.
Process: The open source Joomla! saved money and time.
Potential: Open source code is easily modified.