Open source software has arrived but its impact is yet to be measured. A recent announcement by the government said it is actively considering open source will have a 'decent' impact on the local adoption of this approach to software development and implementation.
This is the feeling that emerged from DEVCon, a recent conference organised by Ricston Ltd, an IT services company for OSS which provides system integrators and technology vendors with a one-stop shop. The Malta-based company has partners in Europe, North America and Australia.
The conference and training experience was directed at software engineers who intended to tap "the abundant and powerful developer resources offered by Open Source".
"Malta is lagging behind compared with most European countries," was the assessment of Ross Mason, who started his own open source project working out of a basement and is now chief technical officer of MuleSoft, an international vendor of OSS.
"Given that Malta is a small community, it is natural that adoption of new technologies is slower and that reliance on vendors such as Oracle and Microsoft is still hugely prevalent. The government announcement will have a decent impact on open source awareness, putting open source at the forefront of any government IT decisions."
That Claudio Grech, chairman of the Malta Information Technology Agency, opened the conference and spoke about OSS adoption in Malta, was proof enough of the government's commitment towards OSS.
Despite this official stance from the foremost authority in Malta, Mr Mason is not quite sure about the roots of open source in Malta.
"I don't believe there is much of an open sourced developer community in Malta today and I don't really expect that to have a huge impact. Running a local Java user group in the past, you realise that while there may be some awareness by developers about open source, they are not always in control of technology selection."
Yet he makes a strong case for OSS.
"In other European and North and South America, OSS is used everywhere from operating systems, infrastructure and middleware to applications and vertical solutions.
"Many next generation applications open source part or all of their source code.
"The rest of the world has realised the benefits of open source: that these are usually more stable (since they are not developed in a vacuum) and offer value over checkbox features and, of course, commercial open source solutions are typically a third of the cost of their proprietary counterpart.
"One major benefit often overlooked is that companies will almost always get better support from a commercial open source vendor since their whole business relies on the customer getting value from the support services. Whereas the traditional licence model requires customers to pay up front for licence fees and then lock them into a maintenance agreement. Anyone that has had to work with a proprietary support centre such as Oracle will know that it is almost impossible to get bugs fixed in anything less than four months, if at all."
Alan Cassar, an open source developer with Ricston who led one of the workshops at the conference, thinks of several reasons why he, as a developer, is attracted to this particular way of developing software.
"Open source is far more interesting than closed source. Competition is much more evident, and rather than being supported from a single company, you get the support of the whole user community behind the open source project. Look at open source projects such as the Linux OS, Mule, Android and Liferay. Their user community is huge.
Also with open source, you get the benefit of being able to look at the actual source of the system. You can learn from it, but most important, you can also debug in the framework's sources and you can find those bugs that through support would have taken ages.
You can also contribute your findings back to the community. These things are impossible in closed source." Stephen Fenech, another open source developer from Rictson, listed more reasons in favour of open source.
"Open source gives the developer the opportunity to explore many different possibilities and also helps you be proactive. If something does not work the way you want it to, you do not have to just accept it and wait for the possible patch to come out some time in the future, you can go in and fix it. Also, since OSS mostly sticks to standards, you will never feel that you are cornered, most of the time you can change from one product to another. Furthermore, you can fully understand what is going on by looking through the sources and debugging."
Besides the developers' enthusiasm for open source, market realities are also pushing for greater adoption of this model of software development.
"ICT industry in Malta is highly affected by foreign businesses since many Maltese companies have foreign clients. From our experience the move abroad is towards open source solutions which will also push Maltese ICT companies to accommodate such solutions," Mr Fenech explained.
Mr Cassar also notes an important effect on start-ups.
"Open source also revolutionised ICT start-up companies. Before, for a company to start operating, huge money was required to be invested not only in machines, but also in licences, such as the operating systems. Today, a start up company can start operating after buying only some decent machines."
During the conference much attention was given to Android, Google's open source operating system which is being used on an increasing number of smartphones and is outselling the more iconic Apple iPhone in some parts of the world.
Android is not just an operating system, it is a whole stack of software for mobile devices which includes an operating system, and other stuff such as very important mobile applications (phone application, contact application), an API so that developers can write their own applications, and other features.
Software developers think developing for the Android platform is so much easier and smoother than developing for other mobile platforms.