One of the challenges was the business model of some of the companies that we depended on. We're in a tightly controlled and carefully licensed world. Not all suppliers of open source software appreciate the license strictures we have, and in some cases don't appreciate our profit motive. Some were more interested in producing interesting code than building a survivable business. So, it took a little while for us to work through the licensing and legal issues in how we would use, package and protect ourselves from potential downstream claims on our intellectual property. And it took a while to reach good working relationships with our key suppliers.
Did you have to change any suppliers because you couldn't work through those kinds of issues?
Early on we did. But I think the industry in general faced that set of issues more or less simultaneously. Everybody was working through them at about the same time.
Have you encountered any dangers in using open source?
Like any software, you have to subject it to diligent testing and add your own quality measures on top. I can't say that all the open source software we've attempted to use has been high quality. But I don't think it's presented a danger, more of a challenge.
To what extent are you using open source internally in your IT organization?
Internally we have probably 15 percent or so of our server environment under Linux. And we're constantly standing up new Linux servers for R&D. But in terms of production environments the company depends on, it's modestly penetrated.
Is it growing?
Yes, it's definitely growing. We were going down a Linux strategy pretty heavily three years ago when we ran into a pretty good speed bump in trying to scale one of our critical applications, and had to retrench and go back to a proprietary operating system to get the performance we needed. That made the businesses very cautious about pursuing it aggressively again. All of our experience tells us that the maturation has been significant since then, but we're slow-rolling it. We tend to put newer, lower-end applications up on Linux and leave the existing apps that are already running on other systems on those systems rather than undertake the risk of change.