As a long time votary of open source, I have been predicting the significant impact of the potent combination of ever reducing chip geometries and open source systems. These days open source HW is finally coming of age, so the term "open source" should be used to describe complete systems. Most of these "predictions" were technical. In general as a technologist, I prefer to stick to technology predictions, human societies are way too chaotic for meaningful predictions.
But as an advisor to various private and govt. institutions, I have come to realize that open source represents a powerful antidote to corruption ! The benefit arises from two factors
1. commodity HW margins are so low that it is not economically feasible to offer a bribe. Margins being what they are in the PC and server business, any "consideration" has to be marginal in nature and the risk/reward ratio gets skewed ! The flip side of course is that since all HW products being commoditized, it is impossible to prove that a vendor got selected for monetary considerations. But transparency of pricing information in the industry alleviates this (hopefully) to a large extent.
But even in commodity HW, vendors play wonderful tricks. I remember a storage project which involved white box x86 HW but the vendor insisted that FC channel interconnects were mandatory to achieve the desired latency. The desired latency on analysis tuned out to be about 500 ms. So iSCSI turned out to be more than sufficient and standard 10GE cards could be used. The FB originated open compute project is helpful in this regard since it specifies commodity components for every piece of HW, right down to the power supplies and connectors. So the time honoured technique of x86 box vendors foisting exorbitantly priced proprietary power supplies on unsuspecting buyers is also hopefully a thing of the past.
2. open source SW by virtue of its lower margins offers the same deterrent to considerations. It also has the added benefit of essentially disallowing vendor differentiation in terms of features. Vendors pretty much have to fight it out in terms of service offerings and happily for the buyer IT service costs also seem to be in a price death spiral these days.
Facts substantiate these trends. A recent tender I managed technically, resulted in about a USD 30M savings for the buyer. I would estimate that the commodity HW and open source SW accounted for around 40% of the savings.
To add fuel to the fire, the various cloud providers have provided an extra dose of homogenization on top of commodity HW and open source SW by making systems management a commodity too ! Public cloud prices though are a bit exorbitant compared to self managed private clouds but that is a rant for another day.
Hopefully the recent Govt. of India directive, mandating open source as the preferred choice in Govt. IT systems will accelerate the trend towards "cleaner" procurement.
It would be interesting to know if the IT systems used by the Central Vigilance Commission is based on commodity HW and opens source SW !
But as an advisor to various private and govt. institutions, I have come to realize that open source represents a powerful antidote to corruption ! The benefit arises from two factors
1. commodity HW margins are so low that it is not economically feasible to offer a bribe. Margins being what they are in the PC and server business, any "consideration" has to be marginal in nature and the risk/reward ratio gets skewed ! The flip side of course is that since all HW products being commoditized, it is impossible to prove that a vendor got selected for monetary considerations. But transparency of pricing information in the industry alleviates this (hopefully) to a large extent.
But even in commodity HW, vendors play wonderful tricks. I remember a storage project which involved white box x86 HW but the vendor insisted that FC channel interconnects were mandatory to achieve the desired latency. The desired latency on analysis tuned out to be about 500 ms. So iSCSI turned out to be more than sufficient and standard 10GE cards could be used. The FB originated open compute project is helpful in this regard since it specifies commodity components for every piece of HW, right down to the power supplies and connectors. So the time honoured technique of x86 box vendors foisting exorbitantly priced proprietary power supplies on unsuspecting buyers is also hopefully a thing of the past.
2. open source SW by virtue of its lower margins offers the same deterrent to considerations. It also has the added benefit of essentially disallowing vendor differentiation in terms of features. Vendors pretty much have to fight it out in terms of service offerings and happily for the buyer IT service costs also seem to be in a price death spiral these days.
Facts substantiate these trends. A recent tender I managed technically, resulted in about a USD 30M savings for the buyer. I would estimate that the commodity HW and open source SW accounted for around 40% of the savings.
To add fuel to the fire, the various cloud providers have provided an extra dose of homogenization on top of commodity HW and open source SW by making systems management a commodity too ! Public cloud prices though are a bit exorbitant compared to self managed private clouds but that is a rant for another day.
Hopefully the recent Govt. of India directive, mandating open source as the preferred choice in Govt. IT systems will accelerate the trend towards "cleaner" procurement.
It would be interesting to know if the IT systems used by the Central Vigilance Commission is based on commodity HW and opens source SW !
If margins are low - support will be an issue. But the Indian Government can well afford to have organization's like CDAC support the open source initiative.
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