• How to propose Drupal as a solution to meet collaboration technology platform requirements for the Open Government Directive plan
• Training and support for setting up a Drupal site at http://www.[agency].gov/open
• Planning for security and scalability of  an organization’s OGD Drupal site
• Design and implementation of Drupal sites to meet specific OGD requirements
• How to get Drupal Certification and Accreditation for Drupal for your agency

Acquia’s vice president of business development, Tim Bertrand, explains:

“Drupal has always seen great success in the government sector and now with the OGD in play, we expect that even more agencies will see the value of Social Publishing in meeting these requirements.”

Acquia will also offer a seminar series for U.S. federal, state and local governments to discuss adoptions and best practices for government use.  This is definitely a smart move as risk averse government agency IT decision makers will take comfort in the successes of their peers with Drupal Social Publishing.

Acquia appears poised to take advantage of the growing interest in open source and social media.  Increased use of Drupal will open the door further to open source usage within governments, in the U.S. and worldwide.  In doing so, Acquia is definitely playing its part as a founding member of Open Source for America.

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For background about R, Ashlee Vance wrote:

“…R is a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it.”

Zack previously suggested that R could become  an alternative to SAS or IBM/SPSS’s offerings in the business intelligence space. However, it seems that both SAS and SPSS have recognized the opportunity presented by R.

For instance, Jon Peck of SPSS wrote:

“Starting with Version 16, SPSS offers a free plug-in that lets users run R code within SPSS having full access to the active SPSS Statistics data, and writing its output to the SPSS Statistics Viewer. With Version 17, we began creating dialog box interfaces and SPSS-style syntax for R packages we thought would be interesting to SPSS users…We see the SPSS-R connection as a way for users to take advantage of the large number of R packages without the pain part of R.”

As Ashlee points out, R is being used by academics, university students and enterprises. If ignored, R could very well have become a threat to SAS and IBM/SPSS franchises.

IBM has a history of utilizing open source for competitive advantage. Instinctively, I thought SPSS decided to support R after being acquired by IBM. I’m encouraged to learn that SPSS made the decision to support R well before the IBM acquisition. It’s also great that SAS has followed suit. I suspect that SPSS and SAS made their individual decisions based on three factors. First, they likely both realized that based on the penetration of SAS and SPSS in the statistical community, neither were going away anytime soon. Second, adding R support enabled both vendors to take advantage of the community of users building extensions and new statistical methods for R. Finally, both vendors likely realized that customers have different skills and analysis needs, and as such, R would be used in conjunction with SAS and SPSS’s programming languages for statistical analysis. In short, both vendors had more to gain by adding R support than by attempting to fight an customer-driven trend.  It’s great to see vendors responding to the opportunities posed by open source projects instead of solely focusing on the risks.  As expected, commercial software vendors are quickly adopting their stance on open source as an enabler for growth.

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Tiemann writes:

“Lately, I have seen an increasingly important and new implication even beyond what Corey Doctorow has said about free when it comes to software: when the cost of acquisition goes to zero, the cost of retirement (aka “exit cost”) cannot be ignored.”

Tiemann goes on to suggest that the cost of exit for open source software is lower than proprietary software. That can sometimes be true. But open source is no panacea for exit costs. Open standards, while no panacea either, are orders of magnitude more helpful at reducing exit costs than open source by itself.

Let’s say I’m using an open source administration and management product, or an open source content management system and want to migrate to an alternative. How easy will that migration be? Compare with migrating in either direction from GlassFish Application Server to Apache Geronimo. The latter will be easier because both products are standards compliant with the JEE specifications. It goes without saying that open source isn’t a necessary condition to being standards compliant. I’d argue that the cost of exit for standards based software, open source or proprietary, is on average, equal or lower than the cost of exit of open source software around which there are no overarching standards.  I don’t have hard data to prove this point.  However, I do know that CIOs making middleware purchase decisions are keenly interested in reducing vendor lock-in through open standards.

I’m not alone in disagreeing with Tiemann’s views on software exit costs. Open source business intelligence vendor Pentaho’s James Dixon writes in response to Tiemann:

“…true that it might sometimes be easier to get your data out of an open system but most proprietary vendors have migration tools to help move data into their system from a competitors – and of course pre-sales engineers to help out.”

Again, while standards aren’t guarantees of seamless migrations and lower exit costs, standards do however ease the burden. If only open standards were given the same spotlight that open source receives.

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Credit: Forrester

It’s no surprise that lower costs, improved integration and increased innovation are at the top of IT decision maker’s minds in 2009.  It would be interesting to see how these three goals were rated by respondents who were increasing their usage of open source versus respondents who didn’t use open source or who were decreasing open source usage. Since reducing IT costs is the #1 goal for 2009, I found this quote particularly interesting:

“For most developers, the end matters more than the means. Forrester has seen this trend in multiple surveys over the past two years. For the vast majority of application development professionals, OSS is simply a means to an end. Most developers don’t really care that OSS is libre (free as in freedom); they care that it’s gratis (free as in beer). If there’s a direct relationship between an OSS component and the top three planning goals from our recent survey, developers will tactically adopt it. If not, most won’t adopt OSS for its own sake.”

I don’t have the depth of data that Forrester does, but this finding supports several customer discussions I’ve had recently.  If free is beginning to matter more than freedom, I’m beginning to wonder if established software vendors can attract developer adoption of new products without offering an open source version of the product?

I’m torn because of the new survey and anecdotal data on this topic.  Maybe it’s because open source adoption has crossed the chasm between the religious adopters and regular developers.  If a free closed source product is more aligned with project needs, then it seems “regular developers” are at least willing to seriously consider it over a less well suited open source product.  Historically, an established closed source product has been overkill for the usage scenarios where open source products were being considered.  But this seems likely to change as established vendors build lighter weight next generation versions of their products to better compete with open source products.

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