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In tough financial times, open source got more than a look


By Alex Handy
January 2, 2009 — 
There were many advancements in open-source software in 2008, but only some of them took place in the code.

The global financial crisis certainly made open-source software far more attractive to enterprises. At the same time, many projects went pro or had their corporate backers snatched up, as when Sun absorbed MySQL. Meanwhile, Google managed to launch the world’s first commercially viable open-source phone, in the form of the G1 Android.

As the year progressed, thousands of projects saw updates. From Eclipse’s Ganymede release to Sonatype’s introduction of new Maven support and coordination tools and SpringSource’s announcement of Spring Dynamic Modules, everyone worked toward easing deployment. The team behind OSGi expanded its reach into runtime embedding in mobile devices with the expansion of its Equinox project, and OSGi bundles saw support in many leading-edge Java application servers.

New-world repositories, such as Bazaar, Git and Mercurial, all saw new code, but their real effects were seen only in the compiled binaries; developers worldwide are beginning to understand the advantages of truly distributed source-code management. In particular, Git is a game changer, at least for its current users. At the Git Together conference in October, it was evident that this little repository had already gathered up a dedicated following who regard the little tool as the be-all and end-all of modern life-cycle management.

The straight open-source faithful weren't the only ones who got in on the act last year. Oracle went out of its way to drop oodles of code on the communities around its software, including TopLink and a new ZFS-killing file system for the Linux crowd. Red Hat pushed its own plugs into the holes left in the OpenJDK when commercial code was expunged from the project. Open-source testing tools reigned supreme as testing company Agitar vanished and as Mercury sank deeper into the folds of Hewlett-Packard. And Selenium and Windmill took over slots previous occupied by expensive functional Web tools.

When Depression 2.0 finally subsides, one of the biggest winners will likely be the open-source world. With no barrier to entry, free projects are just about the only way to kick-start a new coding initiative in these troubled, budget-crunching times. 2009 will likely be just as bad, financially, as 2008, and thus the attraction of open-source software can be expected to grow.

What’s a shame is that the open-source world is no less prone to holy wars over platforms and license models than the commercial world. An armistice on standards battles would be nice right about now.


Related Search Term(s): Eclipse, mobile development, open source, Google, Oracle, OSGi, Red Hat, Sonatype, SpringSource, Sun


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