Geva Perry, of GigaSpaces, has posted "Are Developers Growing in Influence?," saying that open source has enhanced developers' power, because "presumably, the developers don't need permission from anyone higher-up in the organization to use the product, as there is no purchase involved."

The story goes that this is how Linux, JBoss, MySQL -- and more recently -- Spring and Mule, to name a few, have crept into large enterprises. And one day, after some minor disaster, an executive wakes up and says: "Holy crap! this thing is running on hundreds of our servers, we better get some support". Bam! a seven-figure deal is born, and it was the developers who really made the decision two years earlier. Obviously, developers have always been influencers and evaluators of the software they will eventually use, but what I described above is a very different dynamic. If this is in fact happening in a major way, it has huge implications to how software used by developers should be marketed and sold.

He follows with two questions:

• If you work at a vendor -- open source or not -- are you seeing this trend (of open source being brought in because it's open source)?
• If you work at a large company -- as a developer or not -- are you seeing this happen?

Interesting questions indeed - especially considering that some major Fortune 100s restrict all software being used, open source or not, based on indemnification (i.e., an agreement that provides for one party to bear the monetary costs, either directly or by reimbursement, for losses incurred by a second party) and validation.

developers don't need permission from anyone higher-up in the organization to use the product

Developers usually don't have to ask to use development tools since development productivity is the key. But once you turn it over to a support group, uptime and response time are the drivers and that means support contracts, training, and vendor logo squishy balls for the team. This order of magnitude licensing and support cost is absolutely critical for small, competitve companies to beat the snot out of large, slow-moving, management-heavy companies. Please keep using Websphere and VB by all means. In my experience, there is a lot of room to move between a fire-wall and a database. For mission-critical data backup and recovery, transactional isolation, and concurrency going with a well supported database is key. Everything else in between, in the opensource space, is fairly mature, well-patterned, and well supported. RAIDS - redundent array of inexpensive dumb services/sites. Usually you find an IBM, BEA, or Redhat behind many of the major opensource projects. So they have gone full circle from commercially licensed and SLA'd proprietary software to visionary+community software and then back to nurturing vendor supported public and commercial license software. Sun has done a great job keeping the vendors honest with the JCP and Netbeans has kept IBM honest with Eclipse.

I think the fault here is not all on the developer, cause the company should have strict rules for using open source software wihtout having the permission from heigher authority specially if the company is a software company and it develops software which will be eventually delivered to a customer, and then they have to answer the question of who will give support for the open source software included in their application delivered.

As a developer at an educational institution, I mostly use open source. I don't need permission to get open source products since there is no initial cost outlay. I choose open source software because it is good software. If the software isn't good, there are usually free alternatives. I do not need to use software just because I have paid for it, how many times have people bought commercial software, struggled with it and abandoned it for something else? I still choose to use open source software even when I have the option to use equivalent commercial offerings at no cost to myself. For popular open source projects the wide availability of free support via tutorials, forums, wikis and low cost pre-existing books etc. makes them very attractive. I'm not really sure how generic commercial products can compete unless they are offer some competitive advantage (like being specifically tailored for proprietary solutions). A small team of commercial developers updating their product every year or so may have difficulty competing with a widely used open source product that can be improved and released with much shorter timescales.

Most big organization do not allow the use of opensource software without an approval process. This is done in order to avoid risks or legal liabilities that may arise from using opensource software. The risk may also include opening a proprietary code (intellectual property of a company) to the world due to use of opensource software that requires all users to make their cope open too.

Hm... how about putting a real name under such 2003-esque post? Legal liability, intellectual property... I think we've been through this with JBoss, Spring, Mule, etc. People in IT are much better informed today about this type of FUD than they were 3-4 years ago. My 2 cents, Nikita Ivanov. GridGain - Grid Computing Made Simple

Legal liability, intellectual property... I think we've been through this with JBoss, Spring, Mule, etc. People in IT are much better informed today

Interestingly enough, we do get asked what third party software is in our own software and what the licenses are. These kinds of requests are pretty unusual and come from larger organizations. Cheers, David Flux - Java Job Scheduler. File Transfer. Workflow. BPM.

Why the hostility man, I am telling you what I am going through every day to bring opensource tools in. There is even a company that provides this kind of support to large organizations http://www.openlogic.com. Just because you don’t deal with approval process in your company does not mean you get to trash others.

Why the hostility man, I am telling you what I am going through every day to bring opensource tools in. There is even a company that provides this kind of support to large organizations http://www.openlogic.com. Just because you don’t deal with approval process in your company does not mean you get to trash others.

I think we need to separate between two issues. I'm sure that in large organizations there is a formal process for approving free open source software, because of issues other than cost, such as liability and other corporate policies. But on the other hand, in many cases open source software is "creeping in", because there is no cost involved so the developer/architect doesn't need to go to anyone to get the money. Now, it could be that developers just start using the open source stuff for prototypes, testing and such, and it comes to a point -- for good reason -- that the use of this software is a fact of life, and it is purchased through a more formal process. I'll give you a small example from our own -- not very large -- company. Take a look at this case study Atalassian published on how GigaSpaces uses Confluence for our documentation. Our tech writer, just downloaded the software, customized it and came to us (meaning the decision-makers) with something that was a no-brainer. He couldn't have done all of that with a traditional closed-source, paid-for product. Maybe he wouldn't have bothered making a list of vendors, asking for approvals to get proposals, talking to sales guys, etc. He was empowered by Atlassian's open model. Although eventually, the purchase went through a more formal approval process. Geva Perry GigaSpaces - The Scale-Out Application Platform

Geva, I agree with you, I have seen Eclipse coming in as FOSS and companies deciding to purchase MyEclipse. I thought mentioning large organizations effort to tightly control the introduction of FOSS would add to the discussion. Also here is a posting on theserverside that shows HP's effort to control their IT "......teams of seasoned architects across HP IT maintain a master list of components that are deemed most beneficial on various topics of software development. IDEs, web services frameworks, and AJAX libraries are among the pieces reviewed and documented by these experts......." https://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=AStudyofHP

I'm sure that in large organizations there is a formal process

Just a point - this has nothing to do with the size of an organization. Both small and large have tightly controlled or no control or somewhere in between. I've seen all things at all sizes.

If you work at a vendor -- open source or not -- are you seeing this trend (of open source being brought in because it's open source)?

We're a vendor, and I usually don't see this. I see open source being brought in instead of our commercial product because open source is sufficient for the task (pun intended) and the developers don't need the additional functionality that our product offers. For me, it's fairly rare for someone to choose us over open source strictly for the support, assuming that both our product and open source can meet the developers' need. For us, it's usually about the functionality, not the ease with which the software is brought into the organization. Cheers, David Flux - Java Job Scheduler. File Transfer. Workflow. BPM.

I think open source (and low costs in general) definitely pushes decisions down in the organizational hierarchy, potentially all the way down to the developer or user. However, costs have to be pretty low to achieve it. http://erikengbrecht.blogspot.com/2008/01/open-source-cost-and-enterprise-product.html

I'm employed at a moderate sized university of about 12k students. I don't see this happening at all. My team leader and the Director of Applications know about everything going onto the servers. The development process here would make it impossible to slip in any software - open source or not - without their knowledge. The culture here favors stability over being "first to market". That said, our leaders ask developers to do investigations into software products. For example, I completed one recently for an electronic medical record package for our Health Services department. My report went to a committee who will decide on whether or not to pursue software for this department in the 2008 budget.

developers don't need permission from anyone higher-up in the organization to use the product

Not true for me. We defined a procedure if the project team wishes to get a new software in to the enterprise which is considered a medium company with some 200 IT folks ( development / operations / support). In another word, by default, new software cannot be employed. Consistency, maintenance and many other factors outweighs the licensing cost. WK

Since Facebook unfolded itself to application developers, it rapidly turned into an enormous platform. There is a lot of development on this platform going on all across the globe. But today we’ll discuss Facebook development from a developer’s point of view. Basically, Facebook is based on an open source technology that is PHP, however today this massive social network is capable of targeting nearly every platform, DOT NET being the major target. Most of the Facebook applications are developed on PHP but there are some applications on .Net too, like GINA and MyBioFlick (both by FACEBOOKSTER.com ). There are several .net libraries (like Facebook.net) available on the Internet to use for the development of Facebook applications and accessing Facebook APIs. These libraries are built on .NET 2.0, but can run on any latest version of the .NET framework. They are designed to support the use of the Facebook API from desktop applications and will expand the use of Silverlight applications. Facebook applications are basically mini applications that embed themselves through plug-ins. Any application can be viewed on the user’s homepage which are then shared among user’s social network. For an ASP.NET developer who wants to work on Facebook apps, probability is that he has to face some difficulties. Remember there are no such things like “shortcuts� in FB application development. Using your existing skills for developing Facebook applications isn’t an easy task; you’ll have to work on a lot of custom code to handle simple scenarios such as creating a ‘send invitation’ page. Facebookster is working on .Net Facebook apps and will be looking to produce some more quality Applications, as we have produced in PHP section. http://www.facebookster.com