Authors Dan Woods and Gautam Guliani take the middle road in their book \'Open Source for the Enterprise\', in that they neither tout open source as the long-sought panacea for IT departments struggling with shrinking budgets, nor spread a wet blanket of pessimism over open source as some writers on the subject have felt bound to do. Both authors have been users of open source software for more than 15 years, and in writing their book, they have sought the opinions of members of the open source community, IT departments and software companies alike.

A survey of the chapter titles gives interested readers a useful sense of the scope and depth of this book:

• Chapter 1: The Nature of Open Source
• Chapter 2: Measuring the Maturity of Open Source
• Chapter 3: The Open Source Skill Set
• Chapter 4: Making the ROI Case
• Chapter 5: Designing an Open Source Strategy
• Chapter 6: Support Models for Open Source
• Chapter 7: Making Open Source Projects Easy to Adopt
• Chapter 8: A Comparison of Open Source Licenses
• Chapter 9: Open Source Under Attack
• Chapter 10: Open Source Empowerment

The appendixes cover issues such as The Open Source Platform, End-User Computing on the Desktop, Open Source and Email, Groupware, Portals, and Collaboration, Web Publishing and Content Management and Application Development.

Author Woods describes his view of the book, saying, "I try to explain what open source is, how it is different from enterprise software, and how IT departments can take advantage of it by building skills and implementing new governance processes to control adoption."

The publisher, O'Reilly, points out that "Open Source for the Enterprise" avoids the esoteric and heated debate over the merits of open source, concentrating instead on the issues IT managers and executives need to consider as they ponder the possibility of committing to open source within their enterprises.

In Chapter 6, which is available on the O'Reilly Web site as a sample chapter, Woods and Guliani concede that all IT managers wish for a fully integrated open source package tailored to the precise needs of their enterprise. They advise against expecting delivery overnight and, with that caution, proceed to a discussion of the offers currently available from open source support providers. They also advise caution in committing to a particular model.

"Companies that learn how to take advantage of open source software will have an advantage over those that do not," Woods and Guliani explain, noting as well that taking full advantage of open source software involves a typically long learning curve. [...read more...]

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