Open source isn't just about saving money -- enterprises are adopting it to develop applications faster, with higher quality components
When individual developers think of open source, they think "free." And with good cause: Who in their right mind wouldn't be interested in technology that they can get at no cost and use with few licensing restrictions?
When companies think of open source, these days they think "business agility," a quality they increasingly value above all others in the fast-changing marketplace.
The ability to create new applications quickly, reliably and economically is drawing businesses big and small to open source and emboldening them to use it for ever-larger projects, IT practitioners say.
Which is likely why open source's popularity is booming (with a few holdouts). According to the Forrester Research report "Development Landscape: 2013," 76% of developers have used open-source technology "at some level," says Jeffrey Hammond, a Forrester analyst specializing in application development and delivery.
Here are four key reasons why organizations of all sizes are taking open source seriously. Indeed, in some cases, open source is helping to bring back custom development of applications, an option that has decreased in popularity in the past 10 years or so as the use of commercial applications and software-as-a-service offerings gained ground. Taking on some custom development work in order to save money appealed to Carestream Health. A $2.5 billion provider of dental and medical imaging systems with 8,000 employees, Rochester, N.Y.-based Carestream wanted to consolidate the data from its worldwide manufacturing facilities into a single product life-cycle management (PLM) application to reduce new product development and manufacturing time by routing information more efficiently. "We wanted consistent management of product-related information across our global company footprint," says David G. Sherburne, director of global R&D effectiveness and engineering IT at Carestream.
"With a modern platform in place that could be built upon into the future, we were expecting a 5% productivity gain through the integration of existing point solutions and the elimination of manual process steps."
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Facebook quietly withdrew its Poke app from the iOS app store Friday, ending the run of an app that was both a Snapchat competitor and the final iteration of a joke that's as old as Facebook itself. Poke allowed you to send ephemeral messages, photos and videos to your friends that would last up to 10 seconds before vanishing forever. If that sounds familiar, it should — it's an almost exact clone of Snapchat. But Snapchat was launched at the end of 2011, and rapidly gained traction to the point where users now send 700 million photos and videos per day, according to the startup. Facebook Poke was launched a year later, and Facebook hasn't ever revealed usage stats. All we know is it dropped out of the top 25 most downloaded iOS apps very shortly after its launch. It was, however, rather popular with the Zuckerberg family during the 2012 holidays, leading to this infamous photo of family members reacting to "Pokes": That was from Vox Media Director of Marketing Callie Schweitzer, and famously led to a privacy complaint from Randi Zuckerberg, sister of the Facebook founder. It was about the only memorable incident in the Poke app's short history. Even the Facebook page detailing exactly what the Poke app is all about has been taken down. We managed to get a screenshot, however: So where does this leave the original Facebook poke — the ability to "poke" your friends on the service, for no reason and with no explicit meaning, which has been part of Facebook since it was founded in 2004? It's no longer advertised on your homepage or timeline, but amazingly, it's still there. Go to Facebook.com/pokes, and you can still get recommendations on who you should poke.
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