Licence to Bill
July 25th, 2006
Computer Weekly leads with an article about how increasingly complex software licences are being used to extract money from users. I thought CW was supposed to be a newspaper?
As Nicolas Carr has pointed out, software such as operating systems, email servers and clients, web servers, office productivity suites, etc are commodities which bring no business benefits. Therefore, companies have a duty to find the lowest cost of acquisition while maintaining whatever element of control they feel appropriate.
The cheapest route is to participate in open-source projects – this was realised in the early days of commercial IT, but unfortunately in those days the technology wasn’t available to make the process scaleable. Nowadays with the internet and “SourceForge” tools (mailing lists, code respositories, issue trackers,…), open-source software development is massively scaleable. The CPAN respository is said to contain millions of lines of code written by thousands of contributors over ten years.
Consider the economics. In total, the 100 companies on the UK FTSE-100 employ 3.5 million people and spend between £1,000-£1,5000 million per annum on Microsoft licences. If each company sponsored 5 people to work on open-source projects the total cost would be under £50 million per annum and the companies would never have to pay another penny in Microsoft licences.
There are some signs that this message is starting to trickle into the mainstream. Two years ago the vast majority of the work on the Linux kernel was being carried out by 100 company sponsored contributors. However, the big breakthrough would be to achieve a similar level of sponsorship for OpenOffice.org and replace Microsoft’s ageing Office product on UK corporate desktops.
Which straw will finally break the back of the UK corporate IT camel: frustration over unreasonable licencing terms, or simple economics?