Succeeding with Open Source (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

This book grew out of work my system integration firm, Navica, performed for our clients. We serve both large and small companies in a variety of industries, implementing and configuring software applications as well as developing custom systems. It’s not exactly a secret that IT budgets have been tight over the past few years, so many of our clients asked us to explore ways to deliver projects at lower cost.

In our efforts to find ways to lower project costs, we came across something called open source software. Given my background in large IT shops, global consulting firms, and enterprise software companies, I was pretty skeptical about a product that promised something for nothing. The whole ethos of volunteers delivering high-quality software seemed counterintuitive to me. Furthermore, I wondered how we could obtain support and training for the product. In short, I couldn’t understand how open source worked. However, I felt we had to try open source as part of our effort to do the best possible job for our clients.

Our experience with open source amazed us. Far from our nightmare vision of poor quality code distributed by a flaky group of unqualified idealists, we found that robust products were available that performed more than adequately—we were able to succeed with open source. I knew we were onto something when our clients began to ask, "What other open source software can we use in our system?"

This presented us with another problem. Many of our clients accepted without question our open source recommendations; after all, the role of a professional services firm is to serve as a trusted advisor, and these clients expected us to fulfill that role. Others, however, although not mistrusting us, would inquire how we chose the proposed product. If the project plan called for turning the system over to them after implementation, they would ask about training options and quality, where they could turn for support, and so on. Even though we had seen good results with the products we recommended, we really had no formal criteria or documentation we could point to as the basis for our recommendation. The problem was compounded if our clients needed to get approval for the project from higher-ups in the organization. The higher you go in an organization, the more formal the paperwork needs to be. It wasn’t nearly enough to present a slide that, under selection criteria, stated "a guy from the system integrator heard this was a good open source product." Clearly, our clients needed something more concrete for their project approval and budget process.

Even if our clients would have accepted an informal method of selecting open source products for their projects, I was uncomfortable with it. A career spent creating and implementing mission-critical software has made me acutely aware of the importance of assessing software in all its dimensions: functionality, support, training, and documentation, among others. If we were going to recommend open source products as a key piece of our client’s software infrastructure, I felt we needed a more formal methodology that would assess a product along all of those dimensions before we put it into production.

Out of that came our development of the Open Source Maturity Model (OSMM). This model assesses open source products for their maturity—essentially, their production-readiness. The OSMM enables one or two people to evaluate an open source product with less than a week’s work. By doing so, the model quickly identifies which products are worth a more in-depth pilot-project evaluation. Using the model has made us more comfortable with our recommendations, made our clients’ project-approval process flow much more easily, and significantly reduced our clients’ project risk.

As we’ve created open source-based systems for our clients, I’ve concluded that all IT users share their motivations. Open source is going to be widely used throughout the industry. Its cost structure is compelling. I believe the move to open source is consistent with the cost-reduction trend in all industries via customer self-service and self-reliance. As an example, look at the airline industry. In the beginning, it delivered high-cost, full-service transportation, complete with elegant meals and personal attention. Today, airplanes get you there just as fast, but elegance is but a distant memory. Passengers book their own tickets on the Internet (Remember travel agents? Another victim of self service. . .), bring their own meals, and pay extra for a movie, all in the name of low fares. You’ll occasionally hear someone nostalgically recalling the long-gone days of elegant airline travel, usually a passenger about to step onto a Southwest Airlines jet—the Greyhound bus of the sky. The obvious IT analogy is the hardware transformation driven by Dell. You get a rock-bottom price but are expected to install and configure the system yourself. I believe software is going to tread that same path: low prices (free in the case of open source) accompanied by more do-it-yourself work.

Because of this belief, I decided to share our experiences with open source. As it becomes more widely used, a formalized method of selecting and assessing open source software and all of its elements will be extremely useful. You can take advantage of the system we use and shorten your learning curve with open source products. There is no turning back: You will need to be more self-reliant in the future as you choose and implement software. I hope you find the material in this book useful. If you do (or, for that matter, if you don’t), I would be delighted to hear from you; I can be reached at [e-mail] visit the site to view the latest information.

From the Publisher

Succeeding with Open Source is the first 'How-To' book for IT managers seeking guidance on selecting and implementing open source software.

Reader learns the ROI for Open Source, moving their open source selection efforts from guesswork to effective deployment
Author presents the Open Source Maturity (OSM) model -- an analytical framework that supports the selection and evaluation process
A clear, practical, methodical strategy with supporting examples for a thorough plan

IT organizations are turning to open source as a result of two hot buttons: cost efficiency and the need for innovative business solutions. IT organizations need to direct their investment toward business-specific innovation and away from pure infrastructure products. Open source is therefore an increasingly popular choice for infrastructure software. However, open source software differs significantly from its commercial counterpart. Because of that, a different evaluation and selection strategy is necessary -- but until now, there has been no guide to help organizations develop an open source strategy. 'Succeeding with Open Source' is that guide.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (August 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321268539
• ISBN-13: 978-0321268532
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #298,740 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book for anyone who wants to understand Open Source, e, December 8, 2004

By	T. Alves "T" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Have you been wondering how to extend the use of open source software in your organization, but would like to know how to find the right software and do pro-quality evaluations of alternatives effectively? This excellent book by Bernard Golden will show you what's different about open source in detail, how you might make those differences work in your organization, and how to use a simple, effective model that summarizes the necessary elements to compare different apps that might fit into your environment. Using Golden's methods will educate your choices, reduce your risks, and help you to succeed with open source.

This is a "How-To" book for IT managers, but it's also very suitable for beginners. The concepts don't require technical knowledge, and the explanations are clear and concise.

Part I is an overview of everything you wanted to know about open source. It dispells myths, and helps you to understand why open source works at all. Best of all, each chapter has an executive summary, and most paragraphs have a margin note that summarizes the paragraph's concept. This really makes the book easy to read or review. You can skim down the page reading the concept notes until you come to the areas where you want more in-depth knowledge. The overview is excellent.

Part II (which also includes the great paragraph notes) introduces Golden's Open Source Maturity Model, the framework for applying what you learned, or knew, from Part I, and more that you will learn later in Part II. The model is a template that grids the elements for software assessment and weighting factors. When you do the math you get the product maturity score, maturity being how full-featured and ready for production use the product is. Of course, your weighting factors will affect the score to make it useful in light of your organization. Formally scoring a number of products will pinpoint the products you should and should not be considering. This part is pretty simple.

The devil, of course, is in the details. Golden discusses different types of organizations, how they should set up their reviews, weightings and interpret scores. Then he applies this process to a real-world example using JBOSS, a significant open source product. Each element is fully explored in its own chapter, and this is where the rubber meets the road. Golden compares how commercial products provide the elements, then he discusses how open source provides the elements, many times by using different mechanisms. He gives great guidance on how to find and use these resources when they differ from the single-point solution of commercial software. If differences between open source and commercial software implementation weren't clear to you before, they will be after these chapters, and you'll begin to know how to get the most out of them, too. Open source may not be the right answer for your environment, but now you'll know exactly why, and what has to change before it is.

This is a well-written and thorough book, good for initiates and decision makers, made easy to use by the paragraph notes. If open source is on your radar, I highly recommend it.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Viable for commercial projects, August 29, 2004

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The book is a measure of how open source has moved squarely into the mainstream. Driven by the prime example of the widespread adoption of linux by companies like IBM and HP, who merged their unix variants into it.

What Golden tries to do is show how an IT project can harness the power of open source for a commercial project. He directs the book at a sceptical IT manager who has hitherto dealt only with traditional projects. Golden explains various distinguishing traits of open source - most notably that you can build a developer community of volunteers, that is not restricted to your employee base. He suggests that properly used, open source can lead to more robust code, with quicker bug fixing cycles and perhaps, eventually, to a competitive edge.

There is a nice case study of JBoss, which makes an eponymous web container for J2EE applications. If you are using or contemplating using it, check out the chapter on it. He gives you an independent assessment of that organisation and its software.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent resource for purveyors of open source solutions, November 11, 2004

By	Mr. Jason D. Becker (Calgary, AB Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I came at this book from a different angle - that of someone looking for resources and strategies to convince potential customers of the benefits of open source solutions. Golden's book is extremely valuable in this regard. It presents a framework (the OSMM) to assess the viability of an open source solution. It has the added benefit of managing customer expectations for me. It informs the intended audience (IT organizations) what they can reasonably expect from enterprise level open source solutions and what their responsibilities entail. In short, the author describes the underpinnings of a paradigm shift in the process of evaluating and deploying software.