The Open Source Question

But the choice that both the industry and enterprises need to make will have to be both discerning and calculated...

Once the purview of the software developer community, Open Source
technologies have attracted a lot of attention from enterprises as well as the
IT industry of late. The Dataquest-Apple CIO Meet in Bangalore explored the
various benefits and challenges in Open Source–and MAC OS 10–in the Indian
context. Panelists (from left) were Dataquest executive editor Rajeev Narayan,

WeP Peripherals CTO Thomas Anand, Tata Elxsi head (Mac division) Rajesh
Kumar, J
Walter Thompson IT chief (APAC) Sunil Mehta, Apple physicist Ernie Prabhakar,

Exocore Consulting director Gopi Garge and former Karnataka IT secretary Sanjoy
Das Gupta. The discussion was moderated by Sunil Mehta. Excerpts…

Open
Source: The Indian perspective

Gopi Garge (Exocore): The last four years have seen polarization toward Open
Source for several reasons. In India, there has be considerable movement at the
grassroots. When I say grassroots, I am referring to what is very prominent
today in India, that is Linux and its groups. There are lots of groups across
India coming together to promote the use of Open Source.

The second thing is that the government is waking up. At the
center, there have been several individual efforts. Out of the 4,000 odd
computers at the Indian Institute of Science, at least 50% of them run on Linux.
Another industry where the thrust is fairly prominent today is the ISP segment.

There is a lot of awareness about Open Source among state
governments. Starting from Karnataka, there is a lot of movement in Goa, Kerala,
Madhya Pradesh and so on. All these states are considering the use of Open
Source even at a government level. Open Source is not being thrust upon people.
I think there is a very good message going out. People are being asked to
consider Open Source, in addition to proprietary solutions. Against this, the
Chinese government has decided to use Open Source only. I’d like to see that
in our country.

"Most people use Apache and high-level tool kits, which are almost the same across MAC OS 10 and Linux. This creates a nice community with shared interest and shared code" Ernie Prabhakar, physicist, Apple

On December 23, 2002, the Central government met key industry
people and Linux user groups to launch the "Linux India Initiative".

The upside

Ernie Prabhakar (Apple): Most people use Apache and high-level tool kits,
which are almost the same across MAC OS 10 and Linux. This creates a very nice
community of people with shared interest and shared code. Thus people can move
back and forth between different platforms.

It is not a question of using Open Source but how, when and
where to use it. When we talk about standards, the Open Source community has
very much led the way in implementing and adopting standards and ensuring that
its products adhere to certain common standards. In a commercial development
model, certain portion of the source code is customer-driven, which is again one
of the advantages. The third is Open Source has been very good at ID portability
and writing code in a way that it works across platforms. Also, it is very
generous in the number of platforms it supports and accepts. So we at Apple are
looking at things put in open source.

"It’ll become mandatory for an IT company to have security like an IT audit–for security is bound to become a grave concern. We have to find ways and means to fit Open Source under the security umbrella" Sunil Mehta, IT chief (APAC), JWT

Security issues

Apple: Open Source developers are by and large very good at developing for
their own as well as the needs of their immediate community and peer groups.
Hence, Open Source has been extremely successful on server software and
developer tools. It’s harder to get people to understand needs that do not
concern themselves.

Consistency is a great virtue of Open Source, which you can
customize and adapt for wider circumstances. Although there is no central
control, it can be of great advantage. For one, security is one thing where
having a single central point of accountability and very well-defined reporting
relationships is vital–as it helps you achieve certain kind of security goals
more easily than others.

Thomas Anand (WeP): When so many developers unite to
develop something, we are not sure how the security issue would be handled. This
is a big concern and we, in India, have started opening our eyes to the security
issues that are there.

Sunil Mehta (JWT): Sooner or later, it will become
mandatory. It will become mandatory for an IT company to have IT security like
an IT audit and security is bound to become the biggest concern. We have to find
ways and means to fit Open Source under the security umbrella.

Are we Open Source-ready?

Rajesh Kumar (Tata Elxsi): From the Open Source point of view, we can be
classified as three major consumers: academic institutions, R&D labs
(primarily the government) and the Indian IT Industry.

When it comes to academic institutions, there is no doubt
about its usefulness both in terms of cost effectiveness and the freedom that it
gives to experiment with various related topics of computing operating systems.
We need not re-invent the wheel. If we look at it today, we can have the
operating system and develop a new kind of file system with minimal effort.

Rajeev Narayan (Dataquest): As a developing country,
it is cost effective, easier to customize–plus it takes a different approach
towards security. You can take the same operating system and make it more
secure. You don’t have to go back and work under the black box security
offered as a part of a proprietary OS. The main question is what benefit does it
offer the IT industry? My view is that there are a lot of advantages that we can
foresee but will really have to wait and watch. No doubt, Linux is very
successful. However, let’s remember how Unix started. When it started, it was
merely a 10,000 lines of code. After that, it kept expanding, every Unix vendor
had his own brand of Unix and that’s when it finally ended. Because of this,
Windows became very successful. Apple took the ownership of the operating system
that goes under Darwin.

Tata Elxsi: We don’t have the danger of having too
many versions of the operating system. Let’s remember that we already have
Linux there. We will have an Open Source version of Darwin. We don’t know how
many Open Source versions we will have in future and that’s what I mean by
waiting and watching for the future. Also, as a developer, I prefer
documentation to be well planned. That’s one thing we definitely have to focus
on. How good is the documentation of Open Source, not only from the point of
view of downloading a file and going through it, but for developers too.

"There’s a clear polarization toward Open Source in India. There’s been movement at the grassroot level, and the Center is waking up, apart from several enterprises" Gopi Garge director, Exocore Consulting

When I am trying to find out some relevant information I
would try to find out how well I can navigate through the hyperlinks and the
information. I believe that Open Source lags behind on that front. There is very
good documentation available but as and when you need it and which is
context-sensitive. Perhaps, we are far behind commercially successful software.
I hope this issue will be addressed.

The challenges

Tata Elxsi: We are aware of the problem of Open Source that deceives drivers
being written by third parties. But today, if you want to develop a device
driver, the volume of sample code available in some of the opensource platforms
is not that rich. So, we definitely hope that in the coming years, this would be
met very well.

WeP: I am a bit relieved, because nobody has taken the
role of a consumer in my enterprise. The key issues faced by corporates like
ours remain reducing cost and IT investment. Justifying IT investments (which
have 90% intangible benefits) is one of the biggest challenge for anyone
handling that particular role. When we heard of Open Source, the first thing
that kickstarted the movement was cost. We were excited because we don’t have
to talk about RoI and breakeven period.

MAC OS 10

WeP: The good thing about MAC OS is that it finally has accountability. I am
not looking at the specific aspects of the feature because I don’t know how
many developers are working on the MAC OS platform. The key thing is that
someone has to take ownership. The commendable thing about MAC OS is the
licensing, which takes care of ownership and accountability.

Support for OS 10

Apple: The relationship between Darwin and MAC OS 10 is such that MAC OS 10
is a layered operating system and supports three layers. There is the Darwin
layer comprising all the things you get from Unix–the kernel, the library, the
network services, the command line environment, all those things which a normal
MAC user does not see and a Linux user tends to see. An Open Source Initiative
certification signifies that it’s been approved as meeting the criteria on the
Open Source definition.

Darwin itself is available on multiple platforms, I think it
is fair to say Darwin is on Intel primarily as a sibling of MAC OS 10. There are
people who do Darwin distributions on Intel on a commercial basis. But in
practice, it is not a very large aspect of Darwin. The main reason people are
looking at Darwin is as a chance to examine the guts of MAC OS 10, to help them
understand and trust and use MAC OS 10 more efficiently. There isn’t too much
of an effort to try and make Darwin on Intel a direct competitor to Linux. If
you are doing server-based development for MAC OS 10, then Darwin on Intel could
be useful starting point.

The cost factor

Tata Elxsi: No doubt, the cost factor is somewhat important but a lot of
creativity can also be brought in there. As far as concerns regarding different
versions and different flavors, free for all will be a challenge. This has to be
addressed otherwise that particular open source won’t survive. Open Source
implementation itself is not too old, though given the acceptability of Linux,
it seems old. An industry itself learns and ensures how to champion the Open
Source requirement. I believe thisis only a teething problem.

TEAM DQ