Open source bites back

Burkhardt: UK is a little behind in understanding open-source alternatives to proprietary software

Roger Burkhardt, chief executive of open-source database company Ingres, tells Computing why growing resentment over high licensing fees in proprietary software is prompting more companies to switch to open-source equivalents.

Computing: Why would any company choose to undertake any large, mission-critical software migration in the current economic climate?
Roger Burkhardt: People have hard choices to make in a recession, and one of the decisions CIOs have to make is whether to cut back on people or other costs, and the thing that stands out is the high licence fees being charged by proprietary software vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle, which have recently implemented price increases for their software. We see a big take-up from people who do not want to pay premium prices on software licences.

Is lower pricing the single biggest attraction in open-source software?
Many people have had it with aggressive, almost predatory pricing from proprietary database software vendors. You may have laid off 15 per cent of your staff and the whole business is under pressure, but some vendors are basically holding a gun to your head and saying you have to pay more for licensing even though your usage is down. You do not find many people concerned about the technology, and open source is quicker to implement and innovate. But mainly, people are sick and tired of being taken to the cleaners and forced to write more multimillion-pound cheques for proprietary software.

Some companies find that any cost savings on software licensing are negated by support and maintenance costs. What is the Ingres pricing model?
Our model is like the Red Hat model, where we have a free community edition and an enterprise edition which asks customers to pay for support, testing and indemnity. We have some enterprise customers who use the community edition and have chosen to self-support. If you take a proprietary Java [application] stack from Oracle and compare the costs of licensing and maintenance over a three-year period, the list price for the Oracle database application stack [and hardware] is $1.92m (£1.18m), whereas the list price for a combination of Ingres and Red Hat on an eight-core server using Enterprise Linux and JBoss [open source application server] would be $118,000.

What about migration costs?
You can write new open-source applications that have no migration costs at all, and there are examples, such as when the application is written in Java, where the migration costs are very low. But some existing applications from the old client-server world are written with proprietary extensions, and that can mean a migration does not make economic sense.

What other advantages does open-source software offer to business customers?
It can allow them to make the move from proprietary hardware to industry-standard hardware and save money there, and there are also cost savings because Ingres database administrators are more productive than others. The feedback we get is that database administrator skills are expensive and rare, so Ingres helps with productivity by offering simple, easy-to-use management tools and automated tasks.

Recent reports have suggested that take-up of open-source software in the UK lags behind other countries. Why do you think that is?
I hesitate to name a particular factor, but the UK seems to be a little behind in understanding the alternatives [to proprietary software]. People still think about open source the way they did 10 or 15 years ago. There is lots of discussion around the idea that the UK government has been slow to adopt open source, but I work on the commercial side of the CTO role where choices are not driven by what the government does. Many people do not choose to publicise what they are doing, so we are not always aware quite how pervasive open-source software is, but a lot of people have adopted open source over the past decade.

Many IT professionals still worry that open-source software is unreliable and offers poor security, for example. How do you convince them otherwise?
I cannot claim credit for a team which has done miracles in reliability and security. The truth is that Ingres was formed around a database which is 30 years old, that was already a proven asset in the hands of many customers before it went open source. We have established customers such as the Irish government, which has run its entire tax system on Ingres for many years. We also have a Swiss company, BBP, which has developed financial messaging applications based on Ingres and Red Hat open-source software, and no way could it afford to compromise on security and reliability.

How important is standardisation in encouraging more people to use open-source software?
In the database world, Ingres and all the major proprietary vendors support standards to access SQL data, though there are more lightweight open-source databases that have not complied. However, we need to get to the point where there is compliance in both the application server and database world so there are clear and effective standards for those that choose to migrate from Oracle to Ingres or Sybase for example, and to something else in the future. Ten years ago, this was hard to do because there was no application server and different databases had different procedural languages and no middle tier, but today’s Java-based application servers make it much easier.