OSCON: Open source in the enterprise

Thursday morning at OSCON 2003 was kicked off by Stormy Peters' keynote speech about open source in the enterprise and how Hewlett-Packard is involved in the open source community. She talked about a number of business aspects of open source, but I really appreciated hearing about the open source review board at HP. This board reviews cases where HP employees wish to open source applications from within HP and it ensures that code that is released is fully owned by HP and has no intellectual property restrictions. This review board has established the following business cases for when to open source applications:

• The product commoditizes a market you do not currently control.
• The product would make a technology pervasive.
• The product would promote the use of a proprietary piece of software.
• Open source would lower the product's overall cost to the company.
• The product promotes hardware (or other value add).
• Open sourcing creates a custom solution for a customer.
• You can provide profitable services in relation to the product.
• Open source the product allows you to exit a business.
• Open sourcing the product allows you to leverage resources from others.

On the flipside, there are a number of cases where it does not make sense to open source applications:

• Product is a control point for you.
• The product should be obsoleted.
• The cost does not justify the benefit.
• Misdirection and defocusing of resources.
• The intellectual property risk cannot be justified.
• To compete against the open source community.
• Just because its cool technology.

And HP's rationales for using open source software are:

• You would like to promote and existing standard.
• There is already an existing, pervasive technology.
• Refocus your resources on value add.
• No risk of accidentally copylefting an exisiting product.

And rationales for not using open source software:

• The technology direction does not match your strategy.
• The chief architect does not agree with the proposal.
• Time to market is critical (you cannot control open source release schedules!).

Stormy's presentation was enlightening -- its good to see that companies have people who are in charge of formulating open source policies and are leveraging the work of open source developers while crafting sane policies that will maintain a good relationship with the community.

What are your experiences with open source in the enterprise?