Simon’s Blog

In the last five to ten years, free and open source software (FOSS) has made a huge impact inside corporations (a.k.a. “the enterprise”).  However, there are still many companies that haven’t yet realised the benefits that FOSS can bring.   In what will be an occasional series of blog posts, I’m going illustrate some of these benefits.  In this, Part 1, I’m focusing on how FOSS has impacted the tools that enterprise software developers use.

Many people outside the world of commercial software development don’t realise just how much custom software is written inside corporations, for exclusive use inside those corporations.   Companies from sectors as diverse as manufacturing, banking & financial services, and pharmaceuticals employ huge numbers of software developers that are focused on building computer systems that solve problems that are unique to each individual company.    What, then, does the “typical” tool set of an enterprise software developer look like?   Well, there’s really no such thing as “typical”, because some companies have historically invested significantly in tools for their developers, whereas others have invested almost nothing. Why have some companies invested almost nothing in developer tools?  The answer is a simple one: cost.  Enterprise developer tools can be expensive. Some companies simply don’t want (or can’t afford) to make large investments in tools for their developers.

Five to ten years ago, equipping a developer with a complete set of Enterprise-class software development tools would have cost high-single digit thousands of pounds/dollars. As an example, here are the main parts of software development tool chain we used five to ten years ago:

• Relational database modelling and implementation:  Platinum ERwin (now CA ERwin).  Cost - thousands of pounds per developer.
• UML (unified modelling language) and Java source code editing:  TogetherSoft’s TogetherJ (now called Borland Together).  Cost - thousands of pounds per developer
• Multi-language source code editor - xemacs. Cost - free
• Data Persistence Tools. TopLink (now Oracle TopLink) object-relational (O/R) mapping.  Cost- thousands of pounds for minimum package.  Interestingly, we didn’t use this much - it wasn’t that great a tool back then, and our needs were quite complex; which pushed TopLink beyond its limits
• Rich graphical user interface (GUI) development:  hand-coded in xemacs/TogetherJ. Cost - free
• Microsoft-specific development (C++): Visual Studio. Cost - hundreds of pounds per developer.
• Configuration Management: CVS.  Cost - free.
• Build system: Apache Ant. Cost - free.
• Desktop OSes for development and testing: Solaris, Linux, Mac OS, Windows.  Minimum of two workstations per developer.
• Desktop Virtualization: None. Note that while virtualization in the form of early versions of VMWare was around, we couldn’t justify the cost of the licenses.

There were other pieces of software used too, but I think that covers the major tools.   Five to ten years ago, the trend towards FOSS had started - witness the use of cvs, xemacs, ant and Linux.  However, it wasn’t possible to use a completely free tool chain if high-productivity was an important goal.    The expensive options back then were: relational database modelling; UML modelling; O/R mapping; and desktop virtualization.

Note that, because of the licensing costs, we couldn’t justify every member of the team having access to all the tools we used (and we couldn’t justify the cost of virtualization tools for anyone).   We had one copy of ERwin on a single user license, which meant that one member of the team was responsible for most database design;  and we had floating licenses for TogetherJ - so not everyone could use the software concurrently.

Today, FOSS provides options for almost all parts of the enterprise developer tool chain.  For example, this is what our tool chain looks like now…

• Database modelling: Sun Microsystems MySQL Workbench.  Cost - free
• UML Modelling: Sun Microsystems Netbeans. Cost - free
• Multi-language source code editor: Sun Microsystems Netbeans. Cost - free
• Data Persistence Tools - Sun Microsystems Netbeans. Cost - free. (Interestingly, the TopLink persistence engine is still playing a role, now as FOSS)
• Rich graphical user interface development: Sun Microsystems Netbeans (Matisse). Cost - free
• Microsoft-specific development (C#): Microsoft Visual Studio.  Cost - hundreds of pounds per developer
• Configuration Management: Collabnet Subversion. Cost - free
• Build System: Sun Microsystems Netbeans. Cost - free
• Desktop OSes: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux, Solaris (and soon to be Mac OS X)
• Desktop Virtualization: Sun Microsystems xVM VirtualBox. Cost - free.

With the exception of Microsoft-specific development (we do quite a lot of C#.NET work), the developer tools we use today are FOSS (even the embedded programming we do for the custom electronics in robotic products we develop largely uses FOSS tools now). Importantly, the big ticket items are now free; which means that the overall tool chain costs are down by at least one order-of-magnitude today compared with five years ago.  Also of note is the fact that productivity has increased as the tools have become more sophisticated. For example, the time taken to build graphical user interfaces in Java has been massively reduced by using Netbeans Matisse instead of hand-coding.   Simultaneously, the quality of the user interfaces has improved, too.

Looking at the above two lists, it’s interesting to see the impact that Sun Microsystems is making on FOSS developer tools.  Five to ten years ago, even though we had a huge technology focus on Java, Sun Microsystems contributed nothing to our developer tool chain.   Today, it’s a totally different story. Sun provides the tools we use in critical areas: database modelling; UML modelling; data persistence; source code editing in multiple languages; building GUIs; and desktop virtualization.  That’s a huge amount of developer mind-share.   It’s also interesting to see how the tool chain has simplified, with a single tool (Netbeans) being used where multiple tools were used before: graphical IDEs have really come of age in the last five years (no more emacs/xemacs for coding - that’s truly the end of an era in software development).

It used to be the case that developers inside companies were often hindered from working as effectively as they wanted to, because they didn’t have access to the right tools.   Today, when corporations adopt FOSS tools, all their developers are able to access all the tools, all the time, and all at zero cost.   Price isn’t everything though. The question arises - are FOSS tools always best-in-class?  The truth is: sometimes, they are; and sometimes they’re not.  The trend, though, seems to be for FOSS tools to become the best over time.   Why?  Because, over time, FOSS tools are developed in collaboration with a large community of users… and also because, in the end, it’s incredibly difficult to compete with “free” as a price tag.

If you’re not using FOSS developer tools at the moment, there’s never been a better time to investigate whether or not they meet your needs.