Open source software is the only way for users to meet the economic crisis, says Roger Burkhardt of Ingres. But they will have to take some short term pain to get out of proprietary licence structures.

By: Peter Judge, July 5, 2009  on www.eweekeurope.co.uk

The recession is good for open source. In the open source community, that is now a commonplace, a knee-jerk response to any question about open source prospects. But it’s often based on fairly simplistic logic: open source can be cheaper, and a recession pushes people to save money.

In fact, though, things are more complicated. Any kind of change involves investment, and users changing to open source will have to put in investment of one form or another, which can be hard to find in straitened times.

So, for a more nuanced discussion, we met up with Roger Burkhardt. He is chief executive of Ingres, a leading open source database with a fascinating history, and plenty of commercial users. And before that, he was chief technology officer at the New York Stock Exchange, spearheading its move to open source.

We met Burkhardt at the top of the the iconic 30 St Mary Axe skyscraper in London’s financial district, and the city made a suitable backdrop to our talk. In Part 1 of this interview, he talks about the business case for open source. Tomorrow, he talks about the UK government’s role in open source, and about the fate of MySQL.

“A recession calls for leadership,” said Burkhardt. “The easy thing is to cut people.” Expecting a short recession, IT managers can simply lay off staff and struggle along, but if the recession goes on longer, it means they no longer have the talent to innovate. “It leads to a death spiral, and that is just wrong. It’s an absence of leadership.”

Instead of cutting staff, IT chiefs should be looking at other expense items, and in particular, support for proprietary software such as Oracle: “Do you write another million-dollar support cheque, and lay off a hundred people?” he asks. “You might do that if the recession will be over quickly, but this recession is not a short run.”

There are credible alternatives to signing cheques to the big suppliers, he says: “No one has to put their career on the line - there’s a proven alternative, proven day in and day out.” Along with other open source vendors such as Red Hat, Ingres has the right open source and business credentials, he says.

Ingres - open source from the start

The original source code of the Ingres database has always been available under the BSD open source licence, and is at the heart of other products including Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server. The Ingres company gave Oracle a good fight in the early 1980s, but lost share, and was swallowed by first ASK, and finally in 1994 went to the software elephants’ graveyard, Computer Associates (CA).

But when open source software emerged as a viable business model, CA re-launched Ingres r3 as an open source product, and spun off Ingres as a new company, which has won some major contracts, trading on Ingres’ historic strength as well as the open source business model.

The signs of change, paradoxically, come from the places that were once most in thrall to the big proprietary vendors, such as giant consultancies - even ones which have long been in Microsoft’s grip: “Accenture has just started to go public with open source projects,” says Burkhardt. It’s more than lip service, and includes deals which took a lot of resource and work, he says - but they’re moving that way because users want it and they can get better innovation within open source.

“Two years ago there was plenty of work for them around high price proprietary software,” he said. “Now customers want to do more with less - they’re tending to cancel, and postpone deals, or take the work elsewhere

Getting out of the ELA will cost you

But in the details of deals, things are more complicated, he admits. Large users effectively have flat-rate deals under Oracle’s enterprise licence agreement (ELA), so the actual incremental cost of every system they build on Oracle is zero - but the pain comes in a few years’ time when Oracle asks for the next payment, and the user is tangled even tighter in Oracle’s web.

In the short term, in other words, open source can actually cost more. “Users need to know how to transition their portfolio,” says Burkhardt. “Making a new system in Oracle might be ‘free’ under the ELA, but there’s actually a multi-million dollar cost.” Users need to recognise that the current cost of developing with their existing database may be low, but it will eventually hit them when the ELA is renewed.

Put like that, it seems that open source actually has a hard job in a recession, I suggest. There’s an extra cost, instead of a deferred one with proprietary systems. “You have to remember the time frame,” says Burkhardt. “This is not a short term budget cut. This is not a blip. You need to act.”

Despite this, moving to open source does require thinking during the procurement process, he says. If there are costs in moving from proprietary software to open source, the business case has to project a money saving in the future.

Part of the value then is the leverage the user gains with the vendor: if they can move fifteen percent of their application portfolio to an open source stack that they will gain sufficient negotiating leverage with their proprietary vendors to greatly reduce costs on the other 85,” says Burkhardt.

Alongside this, benefits such as simplicity can be brought into play, says Burkhardt: “Open source is seen as a risky options, but arguably it’s less risky. Proprietary vendors have an incentive to drive up complexity, loading on bloated software features that users don’t really require. And complexity is the enemy of reliability.”

Those incentives don’t operate in the open source world, he says: “The functions are driven by the customer. That leads to simplicity, speed and lower risk.”