Open source Vs proprietary: the war goes on!

BANGALORE, INDIA: Usage of open source application brings lot of opportunity to developers, because of the way it has been build using the open standards model. These open standard models allow developers to actively discuss about the pros and cons of the source code, they use in community forum.

At the same time, Adoption of open source in IT industry has seen a major shift, where more and more companies are showing interest in using open source apps in daily operations.

Torry Harris Business Solutions (P) Ltd., (THBS) is one among them who are actively embracing open source solutions and contributing to open source community.

"Being a player in the software services space, Torry Harris considers the open source software as a key enabler to cost-effective software solutions," says Karthik T S, head of CoE SOA, Cloud and OSS, Torry Harris Business Solutions (P) Ltd. in an interaction with CIOL.

He also discussed about the growth of open source and how Torry Harris is contributing to the growing open source community. Excerpts:

CIOL: How open source plays an important role in Information Technology Industry?

Karthik T S: Open Source plays an important role in both the consumer software and enterprise product spaces.  Open Source is a cost-effective alternative for commercial products. Proprietary software proves to be expensive since customers have to pay for upgrades regularly. This magnifies the licensing costs in the long run. 

The maturity of open source software has increased over the decade. Open source operating systems, such as Linux, has gained acceptance in the enterprise. Smart phones run the Android open source mobile operating system.  Open source has become extremely pervasive. From phones to routers and enterprise software to consumer devices - the open source software is almost everywhere.

CIOL: How do you see the growth of open source in recent times and how THBS is embracing it?

KTS: Today, most of the open source software has matured beyond the "Garage Project" level. The open space software now boasts of full-fledged, well-supported and complete products especially in the enterprise arena. There are organizations with full-time employees working on open source products. Their business model is to offer commercial enterprise-class support with no license costs.

Being a player in the software services space; Torry Harris considers the open source software as a key enabler to cost-effective software solutions.  We have strategic partnerships with several open source product companies.

We monetize open source software by offering additional professional services. For example, we provide end-to-end solution delivery using open source software, which includes solution architecture/design and cost-effective offshore application development. We have successfully delivered several projects in the past, which were based on open source products; ranging from enterprise portal to middleware systems.

Next: Open source systems Vs proprietary software...
{#PageBreak#}

CIOL: How open source applications/tools have helped developers in your company to increase productivity?

KTS: Developer tools and libraries was one open source software area that gained a very high level of maturity. Being a software development company, it is highly crucial for developers to be high in productivity. High productivity translates into software delivery on time with no compromise in quality.

We leverage open source development tools like integrated development environments, compilers, debuggers, profilers, utility frameworks, etc. Our internal systems like corporate intranet, knowledge management system, learning management system, support ticketing system, etc are also powered by the enterprise-class open source software.

CIOL: How do you see the quality, capability and ease of open source systems as against proprietary software?

KTS: These factors have gone through a tremendous change over the last couple of years. However, the general perception is that proprietary software is better. It is, of course, not fair to generalize all open source software.

There are certain products that are equally capable as proprietary software in terms of quality, ease of use, documentation, support, etc. The flip side is that there is certain open source software that greatly lags behind with respect to these aspects.

Therefore, it is essential that these aspects be considered on a case-to-case basis. We would strongly recommend the customer to perform a thorough analysis in terms of the pros and cons of areas of interest and business goals before taking a decision.

CIOL: Being open source, do you feel that security is, more or less vulnerable?

KTS: The concept of security is yet again a slave to perception. This is due to the fact that enterprises believe that loopholes in security can be easily identified and exploited by hackers on the open source software. This is probably true to a certain extent.

But, in no way is it completely true. The open source community is extremely quick in plugging the security holes as soon as they are identified. We believe that by following best practices, the security vulnerabilities can be managed most effectively.

CIOL: How actively does THBS contribute to the number of open source communities and in what ways?

KTS: THBS partners with companies that develop open source software to offer professional services. We are active participants at user forums. We provide code snippets and help other community members with technical support.

We have been contributing to the development of the open source software itself by developing plug-ins, add-ons and improving open source software.