Much has been written in recent times about “open source” and its potential for displacing traditional proprietary or “close sourced” software. The question, will open source software be able to topple Microsoft’s pervasive position in the business and personal computing world has been the subject of many discussions at IT gatherings.

In reality, for most organizations, the question is not whether they should be using open source but where and how they should be using it. Open source is unlikely to completely replace proprietary software in the next few years but organizations will have to make educated decisions about where to apply open source and where to wait.

The following article reflects Royal Brunei Airlines’ current position in this matter. It is written by Gerry Mitchell, Head of IT, Management Information Services, RBA.

With over 1000-networked Personal Computers in 24 countries around the world, changing an organization’s computer direction or strategy is not a decision to be made lightly. Never the less, RBA has recently completed an evaluation exercise on the feasibility of introducing Open Office (or StarOffice) as a potential replacement for its Microsoft Office suite of products, in particular, MS Word, MS Excel and PowerPoint at its PC Desktop environment.

The results of the testing were quite phenomenal. From a day-to-day operational perspective, there was very little loss of functional productivity. That is to say, just about anything the Microsoft Office products could do, the Open Office products could emulate, with much the same degree of intuitiveness and ease of use.

Whilst it is recognized that there are other considerations like Training, Support, Risk and Usability when evaluating Open Source, for RBA the key consideration was Cost. Put simply, the cost of maintaining current Microsoft Office licenses for an internationally based organization like RBA is substantial. Therefore, the open source direction offers RBA an opportunity to reduce some of its operating costs without a major reduction in services.

It was also interesting to note prominent ICT research company, Gartner’s prediction that “unless Microsoft makes significant concessions in its new office licensing policies, Sun’s StarOffice will gain at least 10 percent market share at the expense of Microsoft Office by year-end 2004 (0.6 probability).” StarOffice runs on Solaris, Linnux and Windows platforms and is compatible with the full Microsoft Office suite of products.


So what is Open Source?
There are many definitions of “open source” which incidentally is often interchangeably but incorrectly referred to as “free software”. The essence of open source is that when you receive a particular piece of software, you also receive the source code and not just the binary code. This gives you the “free (dom) to modify the source code” to improve or fix the software.

In general, open source software is available at low or no cost. A good example of this is Open Office, which is offered at no cost, as compared to StarOffice which is offered at a relatively low cost by Sun Microsystems in exchange for support and services.

In Royal Brunei Airlines’ case, the direction towards Open Source is sharply focused at this point in time. The intention is to initially concentrate on the PC desktop environment for MS Office equivalent products. The decision to change for example, Operating Systems at the Desktop and Server level is a much more difficult one to make. One of the main reasons for this, is that Royal Brunei Airlines has invested heavily in specialized third party airline software (in particular, its Sabre Reservations system) and therefore much more testing needs to be undertaken before a recommendation can be made to move in the open source direction.

 

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