Open Source & Freeware Products in Maine State Government B. Victor Chakravarty October 6, 2008

Open Source & Freeware in Maine State Government 2 Definitions The Open Source Initiative defines Open Source through ten characteristics. Top three characteristics: free redistribution, inclusion of source code, and permission for derived works. Remaining seven cover further licensing terms. The Open Source Initiative is different from the Free Software movement. Open Source does not necessarily mean free. All this is important to purists, but not to the State.

October 6, 2008Open Source & Freeware in Maine State Government 3 What does the State care about? Creating software is not the primary business of the State. And even for the software it does create, the State is not in the business of selling or distributing them. To the State, Open Source and Freeware products are commodities, no different from proprietary products. The real questions for any product: Can it get the job done? How expensive is it? Can it be supported? Etc. Whether Open Source or proprietary, the State uses the same criteria to evaluate products.

October 6, 2008Open Source & Freeware in Maine State Government 4 Product Evaluation Criteria Customer Value (Return on Investment) Installed Base Scalability Sustainability (Viability) General Excellence & Market Position Supportability Alignment with long-term architecture

October 6, 2008Open Source & Freeware in Maine State Government 5 Practical Considerations Migrations are disruptive Selective memory of past migrations Network Effect Sunk Investment Is it a vertical product or a horizontal product? How many are affected? Proprietary vendors counter-offer with competitive pricing

October 6, 2008Open Source & Freeware in Maine State Government 6 Open Source Office Suite Created a committee to study alternatives to MS Office. Recommended OpenOffice 2.x. Not as a complete replacement to MS Office, but for co-existence. Impediments to complete replacement: Investment in VBA macros and tight relationship with external partners using MS Office. Projected real savings. Planned a pilot project. MS offered Enterprise License agreement. Pilot project abandoned. For the foreseeable future, the State will remain invested in MS Office.

October 6, 2008Open Source & Freeware in Maine State Government 7 Open Source Desktop OS Created a committee to study alternatives to MS Windows for the desktop. Decided against any and all alternatives. Wanted to retain all options. While the same desktop can be easily loaded with two office suites, rolling out two operating systems on the same desktop is not customer-friendly. Open Source Desktop OS is an all-or-nothing proposition. For the foreseeable future, the State will remain invested in MS Windows for the desktop OS.

October 6, 2008Open Source & Freeware in Maine State Government 8 Open Source DBMS Created a committee to study alternatives to Oracle and MS SQL Server. Recommended EnterpriseDB Advanced Server for general-purpose DBMS. Recommended MySQL for embedded DBMS. Oracle offered Enterprise License agreement. No EnterpriseDB Advanced Server in Maine State. Embedded MySQL in WebNM, SubVersion, dotProject, etc. One MySQL-based custom application. For the foreseeable future, the State will remain invested in Oracle and MS SQL Server.

October 6, 2008Open Source & Freeware in Maine State Government 9 Open Source Server OS There never was a committee to study alternatives to proprietary Server OSs. Yet Red Hat Linux today co-exists with proprietary Server OSs. The reason is simple: Server OS is a vertical product. Most customers do not even know about its existence. The State intends to further grow its investment in Red Hat Linux for Server OS. Red Hat running on commodity hardware provides low total cost of ownership, and is fully certified by Oracle.

October 6, 2008Open Source & Freeware in Maine State Government 10 Horizontal Products in Use Google Earth Google Maps University of Minnesota MapServer WikiMedia MediaWiki SourceForge.Net dotProject Embedded Sun MySQL (Plixer WebNM, WikiMedia MediaWiki, SourceForge.Net dotProject) One MySQL-based custom application

October 6, 2008Open Source & Freeware in Maine State Government 11 Vertical Products in Use Apache Ant SourceForge.Net TOra SourceForge.Net QuantumDB Eclipse IDE NetBeans IDE Apache Tomcat JBoss Hibernate Mantis Bug Tracker Tigris SubVersion SourceForge.Net JUnit NUnit SourceForge.Net Cobertura jEdit Dom4j JADE Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby Red Hat Linux Server OS

October 6, 2008Open Source & Freeware in Maine State Government 12 The Top Three Questions How to Support Open Source & Freeware products? The key to good support is advance planning. Whether insourced or outsourced, the support ecosystem should be fully in place before customer rollout. Is it really cheaper in the long run? Emphatically yes. What about the flexibility & adaptability? Does not matter to the State.

October 6, 2008Open Source & Freeware in Maine State Government 13 Conclusions The State uses many Open Source and Freeware products, just as it uses many proprietary products. The State uses the same product selection criteria for both. Since the State is not in the business of creating or distributing software, the State can treat Open Source and Freeware products as just commodities. Yes, they do save money. But they are not free. Launch a support ecosystem before rollout.