Open Sauce Software
Tasty titbits from people using Linux and other open source software in business.
Wednesday 14 May 2008, 3:02 PM
Red Hat defends UK's open source record
Is the UK really a laggard in open source? Red Hat denies there is any problem.
"Red Hat does more business in the UK than in any other European country," Malcolm Herbert, senior manager of consulting practice at Red Hat UK, told ZDNet at the Open Source Forum event. "There's no problem with open source take-up in the UK."
There are plenty of people who disagree with him. OpenForum's Graham Taylor, speaking at the same event, is just the latest person to say the UK is crap at open source - it's become a common story from all open source activists.
Alfresco's Open Source Barometer - a study of the community of 35,000 users of the company's content management system - placed the UK equal sixth in the world, after the US, France, Germany and Spain, and equal with Italy.
"That's really abnormal for enterprise software," said Dr Ian Howells, chief executive of Alfresco. "You never see the UK coming sixth in adoption of enterprise software." He did point out however,
that the top five nations in Europe add up to a larger open source market than the US - illustrating the "long tail" of open source.
"Why are we a third world nation?" asked Howells. "We are putting ourselves at a disadvantage. Why does our government not give better value to our citizens?".
That last comment illustrates the motive Herbert sees. People are "talking up" the UK's failures in open source deployment, to get government attention, because national threats and disasters are the only language that politicians understand: "It's just political, led by commentators dealing with the government," he said.
PreviousComments on this post
Attitudes towards commodity Open Source infrastructure are significantly different than those of Open Source Applications.
Does Red Hat have many UK customers deploying Linux? Undoubtedly but, many of these are likely to be large Multi-nationals still going through the process of Unix to Linux migration whilst retaining their traditional proprietary applications.
The higher up the stack you move away from commodity infrastructure towards business applications the more conservative the UK is.
It would be interesting to find out if Red Hat has been successful in the UK with its Identity Management or Red Hat Exchange Packaged products. I doubt they've sold much but would be happy to told otherwise.
This comment has been deleted at the users request
That's a good point. It's easy to lump open source together, including infrastructure, operating systems and applications. In many cases, it may be possible to move operating system, but still be locked in higher up.
I'll get Red Hat to comment more specifically next time I'm talking to them. I'm sure they want to sell more high-level products, and there's definitely a community of developers and SIs here ready to deliver them.
Unfortunately we face an uphill struggle when, for example most small businesses believe they have to do their accounting on sage (it's the only package their auditors understand).
