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Open source projects: Why it pays to keep quiet

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Published: 25 Nov 2005 15:15 GMT

...itself, but "works on behalf of its member companies to investigate and take action against businesses using their products illegally," according to its Web site.

BSA and FAST
Another industry group that works against unlicensed software, the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST), only carries out audits at the request of the end user, rather than on behalf of software vendors. John Lovelock, the director general of FAST, says software licences often contain clauses that allow the vendor to request a software audit within a certain period of time, but the actual auditing is generally carried out by a reseller of the software.

James Governor, analyst at RedMonk, believes that proprietary vendors in general could use the fear of software audits to persuade companies to keep quiet about migrations. "Lets face it — are you more or less likely to be investigated by an auditing organisation if you have announced a commitment to open source?" he asks. "The fact is, if you're a proprietary vendor and a customer starts making noises about open source, how will you put the thumb screws on? You could say you may no longer be able to offer a particular discount, you could mention an audit..."

For more, read part one of our special report on open source migrations: Why open source projects are not publicised.

Governor points out that the management in organisations are often concerned about such audits, as even with the best of intentions companies find it hard to achieve full software compliance. Indeed, a study by the BSA last year found that 35 percent of software worldwide and 27 percent of software in the UK is unlicensed.

Why publicise?
Although there appears to be a general reluctance to publicise open source migrations, open source advocates are keen for this to change. Mozilla's Nitot says that through offering to publicise their open source migrations, organisations can give something back to the open source community.

"I understand that large organisations often can't give money to open source projects, but at least they could give code, time or visibility," says Nitot. "If organisations publicised their migrations, then the whole world would realise that there is a significant tendency to people switching to open source tools."

GNOME Foundation director Neary agrees: "Since companies using open source software are getting a lot out of open source software, one way they can give back is through visibility. We'd like to have more visibility."

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Its the applications and device drivers that run on windows that cement its dominance. How many people would fork out hundreds of pounds for Vista if Linux ran all the software and kit they wanted to use.